Anyone who has been broken remembers well the incident. It is a moment of complete weakness and humility. There is no pretending. There is not even hope. Just the rawness of complete and utter destruction. All the threads unravel from our grasp and the puppet show collapses. And we cry over the pieces of ourselves. Jagged, shards of a broken mirror, reflecting our fragments. An eye, an ear, the corner of a mouth. A Picasso of a life scattered beneath the feet of passerby. Because people do not stop to notice the broken. In our lowest moment, we are made lower by a world that refuses to look at pain. And there is no putting it back together. As if a little scotch tape could close a severed artery. The shards of who we are, become who we were, ground to dust beneath the traffic of life moving forward.
In this moment, there is nothing to hold on to. Only phantoms that seem foreign and strange. Memories of an alien life from ‘before.’ A world where we did not know the pain of our own limitations. Where we lived in the illusion that we were the hero and that our adventure would lead to great things. In our broken pieces, we finally see that we are all the things. Hero, villain, sage, innocent, explorer, novice, mother, child. Countless faces, more than we’d ever imagined stare up at us, each with their own story in our lives. Each with their own role in our destructions.
And as these many stories grind down beneath the forward movement of life, a beautiful thing happens. We still breathe. Our eyes are gone and yet we see the people hurry past. Our ears are powder and yet we hear the symphony of life.
Because when everything you are is destroyed that is when you can finally become. You didn’t even know you were trying all this time to become. That beneath the layers that life had piled on top of you, the layers that you’d piled on top of yourself, beneath the need to stay safe, stay familiar, stay home, that beneath all the fears, hopes, dreams and things, you were really just an egg, waiting to hatch.
I wonder what it feels like for the phoenix the first time it bursts into flame. As the pressure builds and the temperature rises, it must feel absolute terror. All of its growth, its feathers, bones, talons, eyes and beak, all of its investment in life comes to an explosive end and it must begin anew.
If you’ve broken, you know this. If you are in the process of breaking, you know this. We resist and resist and resist, grasping at the strings of our puppet show. Desperately needing the world we’ve constructed to go on turning. To stay the same. To stay safe. To stay known. Because exploding into flames is terrifying.
I am grateful for the things that broke me. In my resistance, in my terror, in my grasping, and in my naive desperation to keep life small, I broke. In spite of myself, life happened. And I am grateful. I can finally become.
