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
The Wisdom Of Life 