222 Marbles
I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
William Stafford
My son broke a plate tonight at dinner and it smashed into a million little pieces. I got him and his siblings out of the room to safety then spent some time trying to sweep up all the little shards of glass so they wouldn’t hurt anyone, including myself. But that’s what this year is all about really. Sweeping up the broken pieces so they don’t continue to hurt me or anyone else.
So what are my broken pieces? Good question.
I was at a yoga workshop a while ago with the amazing teacher Seane Corn. She was talking about how we can be going along and how someone may do or say something that triggers a hurt from childhood and immediately we are transported to that little person despite the fact that we still look like an adult. Ha, I knew this one well. Most of my friends knew or sensed my broken pieces and had the compassion to circumvent them. Ex-man was an expert at doing vinegar dives right into those old wounds.
I asked Seane Corn, "Are those hurts from the past or could we have come in with them?" She said, “That’s something you’ll have to answer for yourself.” In other words, not an easy answer but she went on to describe how she, as a Polish Jew, had come in with her ancestor’s fears around financial security. Ever since she was young, she knew that she had to take care of herself and she invested every penny making sure that all her relatives were beneficiaries to the security that she was creating. When the stock market bottomed out in the nineties, she saw everything she worked for dwindle to nothing and she realized that the fear she had around money wasn’t even hers. It was something inherited; It was also something that could be changed.
I gave a great deal of contemplation to my broken pieces that Ex-man so expertly triggered. One of the bigger ones was around voice. I was the baby of the family and when I was growing up my father was older and tired from raising five daughters (barely surviving the clash of the sexual revolution and his Catholic religious beliefs). As a baby, whenever I became noisy at the dinner table, my father would take me and put me in a room with closed doors. I would start crying and my sisters would try to sneak in and console me. Eventually I learned to stay quiet. When I grew up, I learned that what I thought was not tolerated at the dinner table or anywhere else in my home. I learned to be shy. When I got married, I would whisper my opinions into my husband’s ear and he would convey them to the group. Yet I would get frustrated, as they were usually good insights and he would get the credit. We agreed that he would use the precursor, “Lisa thinks that . . . “ Obviously this charade couldn’t last forever. For a writer, a voice is essential.
Back to Ex-man. Sometimes when we’d argue he’d put his hands over his ears and say “La, la, la, I’m not listening.” Yes, not only was this childish but for me, it was like stepping on a broken shard of glass, that little girl that thought that she had no voice. It made me angry. In hindsight it was almost comical, but for a writer who had spent her life trying to find a safe place for her voice, it was an assault on the spirit. So I had said that my other friends had the compassion to circumvent those old wounds. Maybe Ex-man had enough compassion to dive right in.
I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
William Stafford
My son broke a plate tonight at dinner and it smashed into a million little pieces. I got him and his siblings out of the room to safety then spent some time trying to sweep up all the little shards of glass so they wouldn’t hurt anyone, including myself. But that’s what this year is all about really. Sweeping up the broken pieces so they don’t continue to hurt me or anyone else.
So what are my broken pieces? Good question.
I was at a yoga workshop a while ago with the amazing teacher Seane Corn. She was talking about how we can be going along and how someone may do or say something that triggers a hurt from childhood and immediately we are transported to that little person despite the fact that we still look like an adult. Ha, I knew this one well. Most of my friends knew or sensed my broken pieces and had the compassion to circumvent them. Ex-man was an expert at doing vinegar dives right into those old wounds.
I asked Seane Corn, "Are those hurts from the past or could we have come in with them?" She said, “That’s something you’ll have to answer for yourself.” In other words, not an easy answer but she went on to describe how she, as a Polish Jew, had come in with her ancestor’s fears around financial security. Ever since she was young, she knew that she had to take care of herself and she invested every penny making sure that all her relatives were beneficiaries to the security that she was creating. When the stock market bottomed out in the nineties, she saw everything she worked for dwindle to nothing and she realized that the fear she had around money wasn’t even hers. It was something inherited; It was also something that could be changed.
I gave a great deal of contemplation to my broken pieces that Ex-man so expertly triggered. One of the bigger ones was around voice. I was the baby of the family and when I was growing up my father was older and tired from raising five daughters (barely surviving the clash of the sexual revolution and his Catholic religious beliefs). As a baby, whenever I became noisy at the dinner table, my father would take me and put me in a room with closed doors. I would start crying and my sisters would try to sneak in and console me. Eventually I learned to stay quiet. When I grew up, I learned that what I thought was not tolerated at the dinner table or anywhere else in my home. I learned to be shy. When I got married, I would whisper my opinions into my husband’s ear and he would convey them to the group. Yet I would get frustrated, as they were usually good insights and he would get the credit. We agreed that he would use the precursor, “Lisa thinks that . . . “ Obviously this charade couldn’t last forever. For a writer, a voice is essential.
Back to Ex-man. Sometimes when we’d argue he’d put his hands over his ears and say “La, la, la, I’m not listening.” Yes, not only was this childish but for me, it was like stepping on a broken shard of glass, that little girl that thought that she had no voice. It made me angry. In hindsight it was almost comical, but for a writer who had spent her life trying to find a safe place for her voice, it was an assault on the spirit. So I had said that my other friends had the compassion to circumvent those old wounds. Maybe Ex-man had enough compassion to dive right in.
Ernest Hemingway wrote, "The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places." Do you know your broken places?
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