Cracks

"There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in."
- Leonard Cohen

I find it beautiful that no matter how you try to shut light out, it has a way of getting in. Closing a bedroom door at night, with a sliver of light crawling in from the bottom of the door. Drawing the curtains, only to be awakened by a piercing sun beam stabbing its way through the crack between them.

That's the amazing thing about light - no matter what we do, it has a way of getting in. We can close our eyes or draw the shades tighter and try to shut it out. Or we can throw the curtains open and embrace it.

After I lost my son, I was in a very dark place for a long time - at least 18 months. Nothing looked or felt right, like a fog or an old black and white movie with specks and lines in it. I was a ghost of a human being. I am sure seasons changed, the sun shone, but I don't remember it. All I remember is gray.

There were lights that tried to get in, but they were too bright for the dark place where I was, like the pain your eyes feel emerging from a dark theater into bright sunlight. There was one light that I let in, because it was new, and it healed me. It was the light of my nephew who, in allowing me to love him and loving me in return as only an infant can, healed me in ways I never could have found on my own. I read once that to heal from grief, find something you love and love it.

Losing my son broke me, shattered me. I had been broken and cracked before, as we all experience in life, but never shattered. I visualize myself and all lives as vases. Beautiful, fragile, capable of holding so much. My vase for sure had chips and cracks. But losing Eroll was like someone had picked me up and thrown me violently to the floor.

If you've ever broken something like that, you know that pieces fly everywhere - some so small they are never recovered. And pretty much every time something is shattered like that, it is a lost cause. Irreparable. Best to sweep up the pieces and put them into the trash.

Thinking of a life shattered like that, it's not hard to see and understand why some people never recover. Can you imagine taking those tiny pieces - thousands of them - and trying to put them back into what they once were?

I like to believe this is what I did and am still doing, fully knowing and acknowledging that the vase of myself will never be the same. There will be scars of the brokenness, there will be pieces forever missing.

Before this retreat time, I found this quote that I posted:

"When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something has suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful." ~Barbara Bloom

I have always found beauty in brokenness, but I am not sure that I did that, filled my cracks with gold. I think I've tried to smooth over the cracks, to make it appear that I was whole, normal.

I had a revelation about 18 months after losing Eroll. Driving home from work, on a gray day in a gray city, I realized that I could allow Eroll to be a cloud over my life, a dark place I could not get out of. Or I could choose to let him be the light in my life. I didn't want people to see my anger, bitterness, and depression and say, "She is that way because of her son." I wanted people to say, "She is loving, compassionate, and joyful because of her son." This day was a turning point in my healing and in my coming alive again.

Cracks are always thought of as negative. They are places where we experience leaks, where we lose things, where there is a risk of further breakage, of weakness, where things can get in, or get out.

One of my favorite spiritual teachers is Sobonfu Somé. She came to the U.S. from Burkina Faso in West Africa and is a voice for indigenous wisdom and spirituality. At a new age bookstore, I impulsively picked up the last they had of her book, "Falling Out of Grace: Meditations on Loss, Healing and Wisdom." (From what I've found, it is now out of print, but if you watch, you can find it on eBay).

In her book, she defines grace as the state every being strives for, living harmoniously, progressing toward the purpose we are meant for.

Somé says we must be broken, sometimes many times, before we can experience grace. And this brokenness, this falling out of grace, is a gift.

She also teaches that when we feel we have fallen out of grace, when we feel we have been broken, whatever event or person or feeling that caused it is trying to tell us something. It is in that place, that person, that feeling, that we must focus, because that thing that jolts us out of our complacency, that thing that breaks us, is where we find our true purpose, our happiness.

Maybe the thing that breaks us, that causes cracks in our vase, is the one thing that lets the light in, that opens us to where we are meant to be, even when we are blinking and teary-eyed from its brightness.

There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

...