The Mother of all Invention is Broken


0079-Brokenness

In order to experience our life, we must dismember and rearrange minuscule bits of biology and other morsels of matter, energy, space, and time to compose them into this nebulous cloud that we call “I”. Using a wide-angle lens to gaze upon our collective state of being, we see a compulsion on the part of biological creatures great and small… Indeed a mandatory obligation, to selectively suckle from the breast of this larger reality we are simultaneously baptized in and contributors to.

By this same token, we must break apart and rearrange specific forms of structured energies to sustain ourselves, eternity itself must be dismembered for us to experience even the tiniest moment in time, the slightest of registration of awareness, passion, or agency… Without brokenness we cannot yearn for intimacy, nor experience it if it comes. It is both a grand and monstrous truth that our experience of life is a product of brokenness. Our deepest pleasures and most exalted experiences flow from shattered rays of brokenness in one form or another. The same is true for the deepest depths of our sorrows or the slightest response to the most mundane snapshot of experiential paint conjured by our mind – conjured out of broken symmetry.

Not a single moment of our lives can be experienced, much less cherished, unless it also passes. It is in brokenness that we can find the means to re-member the fragments of joy and through which we can cherish those moments as they echo, ever paler with the passing of time. Just as night gives rise to our capacity to recognize the day, forgetting builds the foundation for the value of remembering. Without brokenness, we would be unable to distinguish anything from the monotone singularity that is the only alternative to this brokenness which we share. Meaning itself stems from membranes of abstraction that differentiate one thing from another – yet another chorus of brokenness emerging from the crucible of contrasted unions that shape our wonderfully splintered reality.

When we see from this distance we might appreciate the shattered womb of brokenness we are and share because it is the mother of all that is. It is our mother and without her, there would be no relationships and no experience at all. By understanding the simultaneous unity and separateness of that which we are – in relationship, and that from which we come to relationship, brokenness, we can also understand that if it were not for this division, there would be no discovery, no unity of being, nothing to share with each other, because it is out of this boiling sea of shattered divisions that “being” itself is born.

The gift of brokenness compels us to travel on this journey on which we find ourselves, ever hungering for balance and intimacy – and when we see the depths from which we come with clarity, we realize the paradox that we cannot be separate at the same time we are broken, for we are children of the cosmos, stardust – secure in our mother’s womb, for all eternity and basking in the greatest gift that brokenness has to offer – this garden of living fire that is us and always has been.

“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP” – Leonard Nimoy

4 responses to “The Mother of all Invention is Broken

  1. WordsFallFromMyEyes

    In brokenness. It is finally, so lately, dawning on me: in brokenness.

  2. Our brains are broken in two. Judaism believes that the soul is split in heaven and the two halves descend to earth separately in male and female form. It is said the two halves of the broken soul spend the whole of their lives search for each other and when they are finally reunited in love the gods cheer!

    • I see through a natural lens more so than a cultural one, although I would not dispute that cultural lenses can afford us a profound pointer in some cases to things deeper than a strict reductionist scientific one can. Using a natural lens, I see a left and a right hemisphere as well as a number of other cognitive functions and relationships both in and outside outside the realm of the brain itself. These are as far flung as the stomach which has its own brain, and such things as air, gravity, the production of elements in the crucible of stars and space-time. In addition I see our umbilical connection to other life forms, especially those we currently call “primary producers” in a food chain of a food web as being the umbilical cord that translates the womb of non-biological reality into the complex cooperative relationship dynamic we know as biology. In seeing these fantastic natural wonders, I also see the messages pouring out of their structure such as the need for nourishment, interdependence and the value of sustainability.

      I would agree that defining relationships by nourishing and sustaining each other as a whole body of life is the root of intimacy and fulfillment regardless of gender, species or even biological and non-biological, but specific to us as humans, gender and the way we are equipped to reproduce biologically through coming together is a powerful message about what does fulfill us in general. Again, I see this through a natural lens, but this agrees in principal, if not in complete detail, with what you have said if I understand you accurately. Thanks for your comment.

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