When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful - Billie Mobayed
We Are Glass
I've read in countless spiritual guides, self-help books, motivational guides that we are all "broken" in some way. Throughout the course of life, events conspire to break us - we suffer losses, disappointments, heartbreak, failure and sometimes what feels like endless struggle. Someone I love dearly is having a "breakdown" - that's what they call the loss of touch with reality that comes from a steady diet of psychological pain. Even if the situation is not so dire for us, we've all experienced moments, perhaps days or weeks when we felt just shattered by circumstances. But the question for me has always been whether being broken means broken down or broken open. There's a huge difference and I've written numerous poems about that thought over the past few years. It seems to me that if we are all broken in some way, what counts is how we put ourselves back together!
What if we could see ourselves and others as perfectly imperfect...patched with the gold of the lessons we've learned and the vulnerability we've accepted without the shame that usually haunts us because we're "not good enough" or we're "weak" or "afraid?" What if we could see ourselves as more beautiful because we're damaged and imperfect and because we've been broken open by our suffering, exposing the deeper heart and soul of who we are and finding that lovelier than we ever knew was possible? What if we could accept our wounds as important and even possibly necessary aspects of our own "soul" development? (You don't have to believe in the religious definition of soul to understand what I mean but if you prefer, use spirit or heart or just plain human). What if we could accept that as Leonard Cohen wrote in the lyrics to Anthem, "There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in"?
"Pain is the great teacher," said writer May Sarton, so what if we could study the lessons and find the gold or the light that makes us more beautiful than ever. This is how I expressed it in the poem I wrote at the same time as I created this image:
IN THE SHATTERING
Shattered -
the fragile glass of me is shattered,
crushed and broken into tiny shards
now reflecting, diamond-like,
a thousand points of light -
magnifying what had once been
but a solitary beam, diffuse, opaque -
as if in the final breaking,
the small, soft, subtle glow,
so long and well contained within
the shape that was the whole of me
is now free to sparkle all the more -
brilliantly, blindingly more -
each crystal sliver multiplying
radiance only dimly shown before.
How could I have known
when I was whole and empty
that it would be in breaking
that I would shine so brightly,
be more luminously transparent,
with a glory all out of proportion
to the pain of the shattering itself?
How could I know that I held
a million different joys inside
just waiting for release?
How could I know that I
was never meant to confine
the light of the Divine inside
but was always and eternally
envisioned in the mind of God,
as each of us is truly meant,
to be at last its sacred shine?
Shattered -
the fragile glass of me is shattered,
crushed and broken into tiny shards
now reflecting, diamond-like,
a thousand points of light -
magnifying what had once been
but a solitary beam, diffuse, opaque -
as if in the final breaking,
the small, soft, subtle glow,
so long and well contained within
the shape that was the whole of me
is now free to sparkle all the more -
brilliantly, blindingly more -
each crystal sliver multiplying
radiance only dimly shown before.
How could I have known
when I was whole and empty
that it would be in breaking
that I would shine so brightly,
be more luminously transparent,
with a glory all out of proportion
to the pain of the shattering itself?
How could I know that I held
a million different joys inside
just waiting for release?
How could I know that I
was never meant to confine
the light of the Divine inside
but was always and eternally
envisioned in the mind of God,
as each of us is truly meant,
to be at last its sacred shine?
Copyright Lianne Schneider 2014
All art and poetry unless otherwise noted is the intellectual and artistic property of Lianne Schneider and may not be copied, reprinted, reblogged in its entirey without the express permission of the author.
All art and poetry unless otherwise noted is the intellectual and artistic property of Lianne Schneider and may not be copied, reprinted, reblogged in its entirey without the express permission of the author.
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