Broken Things
There are people who are born with cracks. Like clay vessels that were never fired quite right. We spend our lives carrying a quiet kind of brokenness.
If we’re lucky, light finds its way in through those cracks. Or maybe it doesn’t.
It amazes me how, in this age of information overload, the very same event can be told from the light or from the shadows. That’s marketing. Some of it is honest; some of it isn’t. A fact is simply a fact, yet we humans wrap it in the story that best serves the interests we belong to. And people gather around that story, becoming more or fewer followers depending on how compelling the narrative is.
Neutrality barely exists anymore. Perhaps it never did. To truly achieve it, one would have to become a monk living in the most remote corner of a mountain. And even there, somehow, something from the outside world would eventually find its way in.
Sometimes I wish I were a vessel resting in that hidden place. Living in silence.
Sustained only by rainwater, allowing it to slowly seep through my cracks. The water that passes through me nourishes the earth, and, with a little luck, grass begins to grow. Perhaps even a flower.
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Then the vessel is no longer alone. It rests upon a loving bed of grass and wildflowers that holds it, embraces it, soothes its wounds, softens its chipped edges, and somehow fills its emptiness.
Years go by, but the vessel’s purpose remains the same.
I no longer know how many cracks it carries, how many edges have chipped away, how much fragility is left. Or perhaps it isn’t fragility at all, but the quiet strength it takes to keep all the pieces together.
I breathe.
For now, I mend my cracks with the clay offered to me by the hearts I meet along the way. They may open again someday. There’s no way to know.
It doesn’t matter.
We keep going.
