I found this piece on my friend Eve’s altar. It really spoke to me. In California, before I understood what had happened to me, I called these breakings “Shipwreck.” I did not see these times as times of recovery and healing, I saw them as failure. I saw them as times of respite, after which I went back into the fray.
Beautiful Broken Things
There is a rest in brokenness. You lie on that hard ground, unable to function as you did before. So you lie there. There are no more “shoulds” because the luxury of self-recrimination was taken from you when you fell and broke to pieces on the earth below. “Cannot” doesn’t matter now either. All that exists in this moment is “What Is Now.” This. And there is beauty in the brokenness. It is a beauty of constellations in the scars, of tides in the tears, the heat of fire in the bleeding of you. In the abrupt quiet that follows an unexpected injury, a sacred silence fills you. And because there is nothing left in you that can create, push, force, be or drive into, there is a blessed empty space, to be filled by something other than all the crazed and busy thinking, the manic achieving, and the over-scheduled hours. This blessed, beautiful brokenness is the prayer that summons the spirit, calls forth the angels, lays us down gently. In these seasons of humble brokenness, we are opened, utterly. There is no protecting yourself here. This is the stripping away of ego-driven, striving conception. Let there be grace. Let there be mercy. Allow the broken places to show you their beautiful rest.
The broken stick on the forest floor is the branch who earned her rest. I bless the stick. I bless the branch. I bless the rest. Sarah LaRosa 2013
Sometime ago I posted a piece about the Hindu Goddess Akhilandeshvari, whose name means “Never-not-broken.”