I just finished reading a brilliantly written and painful 21 page article in the New Yorker about the history of Armenian genocides in Turkey. Turning to Facebook for a little comic relief, I looked to see what was on the mind of Gavin Fritton, a Kansas City pundit whose sound bytes include lines like "Call me old fashioned, but I just don't think a general practitioner should refer to himself as "The Prostate Whisperer". Tonight his post was uncharacteristically tender: this quote from Ernest Hemingway.
"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are stronger at the broken places."
Reading it, I instantly envisioned three small pots I saw at a museum last year. Very old, softly blue-green and each veined in places with branches of gold, these were Kintsugi-- broken vessels repaired with gold-mixed resins. The result of the defects and their subsequent healing were objects of more value and beauty than possible in their former perfect state.
There's a late line in Cheryl Strayed's book and movie "Wild" where she talks about all her terrible choices. What if I had never, she asks. And she answers herself: what if if was ok, not only ok, but what if it was what brought me where I needed to end up? "What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?"
Here's the challenge, and ok, it's not so tiny. Can you find one thing, one almost unforgivable thing, that you have done or that has happened to you, and find the gold in that crack?
1 comment:
Redemption and forgiveness for all of these little tragedies. Thank you for shifting the story.
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