Beauty & Broken Things
"Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find."— Terry Tempest Williams
The author, Terry Tempest Williams, tells a story about a artist who creates collaborative mosaic murals in inner cities. The first thing the artist does is instruct teams of residents to go out and gather up all the small broken things they can find discarded on the streets and alleyways of the neighborhood. They return with all kinds of glass, metal and other found bits and pieces which are washed and carefully sorted. Then the artist helps the group to design a mural using images that are meaningful to the community. With water and grout and hands (most importantly hands) they create a large wall sized mosaic made entirely from things that might seem damaged, fragmented or beyond repair. The wall becomes a testament to the resilience of the people who live in that community, a symbol of how what was wounded can be healed, a reminder that even our struggles can be remade and redeemed into something of beauty.
We can call something broken and end the sentence. Such things do happen.
But we can also gather the pieces and fashion something new, something powerful, something informed by what we discover or learn in the process. We can create something improbable but not at all impossible.
These days we can buy a six pack of socks at Target for a small price. But back when most socks had to be knitted by hand stitch by stitch from homespun yarn people learned to darn socks, reweaving and repairing the holes worn in the toes or heels. People were more accustomed to fixing what needed mending. My grandmother reworked the scraps of old clothing into patterned quilts, quilts that were lovely to look at and that kept her children warm on cold nights. I’ve seen beautiful dry stacked stone fences made from the rocks that had to be pulled up out of the fields before anything could be planted. I’ve eaten apples from the orchards planted in those rocky fields. Sometimes things get worse before they get better. Sometimes there are more stones to stack before the day is done. Sometimes we save the best part of the shirt and use it to sew together a new blanket.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about that artist and the powerful, beautiful expansive image of what the community envisioned and created primarily of colored glass from shattered bottles. As this year wears down like the heels of a well loved, well used and well knitted pair of socks, let us remember how to reweave our connections and mend what has frayed. As we come together with family and friends, let us recognize how we keep finding in even unlikely places what is fine and true. Let us celebrate what keeps holding the world together in the bits and pieces and all that is beautiful. ,
Question
What is something beautiful you encountered this week? What does it mean to you to “making beauty in the world we find”?
Music, Always Music
As we round the corner into the solstice and into a new year this song is called The Brink of Everything. It was inspired by conversations with my friend Parker J. Palmer and written as a companion piece to his book “The Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity & Getting Old.”
One Inch Photos
Here are some beautiful things I’ve seen this week….
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These are all so lovely! thank you for lifting my day in a million ways my friends.
My grandkids have learned to bring me their clothes that need to be mended. I love to nurture them in this way.
My mother is long gone, but we still talk about Saturday Soup, our family tradition. In the morning she'd throw all the leftovers in a giant crockpot, and we'd gather for lunch. Neighbors would come, and as we kids (8 of us) grew up and had our own kids, we still gathered on Saturdays for Mom's soup. It was never the same twice, but the love and family connections were always there.