all those feelings of brokenness
I tried to throw away
now shining in the starlight
Posts Tagged ‘brokenness’
In the Junkyard of the Heart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, feelings, shining on June 27, 2026| 4 Comments »
For What Ails Us
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, connection, friendship, healing, heartache, medicine, trust on March 25, 2026| 4 Comments »
Wini weeps as she tells me “everyone is so broken,”
and a small shrine appears in the tear on her cheek.
I kneel inside it as it slips to her chin.
My throat clenches, my own heart widens,
enlivened by how deeply Wini cares,
and somehow her heartache begins to mend
my own grief for this cruel and callous world.
More than any beauty. More than the uplifting song
of the red wing black bird trilling through the open window.
More than the scent of basil and lemon.
More than the dark silhouette of two herons winging
through the nectarine sunset. Wini’s tears heal me.
Shared ache becomes its own medicine.
No. Not the ache. The medicine is in the love that fuels
the ache. It feels so right, I forget to wish it didn’t hurt.
In the Wing Dedicated to Heartbreaks
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, bully, childhood memory, infinite, memory on January 13, 2026| 12 Comments »
after reading “The Reassembly” by Isabella Nesheiwat
In the museum of the chest, I find
on a dusty back shelf my old favorite lunch box
with Hollie Hobbie’s picture raised
on one metal side, her big blue
bonnet covering all of her face.
The box is dented from where Donny,
a grade older, kicked it that day
when I walked the shortcut home from school.
He told me Holly Hobbie was for babies.
I arrived home feeling dented, broken, too,
embarrassed to be myself.
I run my fingers over the cool silver latch
and open the lunch box again.
Empty now except for the old story
I told myself about my unworthiness.
Instead of listening to the story,
I listen to the emptiness. Hear my heart
beating true in my blood warm chest.
The heart says, What is infinite in you
survives all brokenness.
I write these words in the dust
on the shelf beside the box.
The museum curator doesn’t chastise me.
She smiles at what I wrote. She nods.
Let the World Have Its Way With You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged blooming, brokenness, daisy, flower, garden, opening, rain on June 9, 2025| 12 Comments »
Today it’s the daisy that teaches me
about opening. How lovely it was last week.
I praised its yellow, sun-gold petals
reaching out as they were from the bright center.
After last night’s fierce rain, the flower has been trashed,
stripped of its petals. Every. One. Bent and bruised,
they lie splayed in the dirt. And the daisy
goes on with its growing. New leaves.
New roots. New buds. Nourished
by the rain that tore the flower apart.
How often have I, too, lost all my petals, only to learn
that was not the end of the story of opening?
This world is a world of both beauty and loss.
Did I ever really believe one opening
would last me forever? It’s always a lifetime
of learning. Today it’s so clear that when
I can bring presence to loss or resistance,
this act makes pain itself luminous,
is how the heart grows roots, and buds and leaves.
Always it returns to this—offering the broken world
my wonder. In return, oh, the opening.
On Inauguration Day, Amy Serves Me Tea
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, brokenness, inauguration, tea on January 21, 2025| 13 Comments »
The clay mug had clearly been broken,
even shattered, then reassembled
with a clear amber glue that allowed
me to see winter sunlight shining through
its walls when I lifted the mug to sip
the rich black tea. I swear, the drink
was even more delicious served
in a vessel so thoughtfully remade.
All day I thought of broken things.
All day I thought of repair. All day
I thought of ways to make beauty
out of what looks, for a time, like despair.
Staying Alive, Staying Alive
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, falling in love with the world, medicine on December 31, 2023| 5 Comments »
You say it straight, he says.
We’re standing in the middle of a party
surrounded by curly wigs and sequin pants
and the Village People spell again into the air
as the doctor wearing bell bottoms
tells me how to share bad news:
First the diagnosis—
the symptoms and tests that suggest it.
Then how much life might be left.
Then ideas for what steps come next.
And there in my white go go boots
I think, this is how I want to love life—
want to love it straight up.
Not only when it’s beautiful.
Not only when I’m laughing.
I want to love life when I’m face to face
with what can’t be fixed,
want to love it even as I see
this is how it might end,
want to love it as I take the steps
to do what can be done,
knowing it won’t change the end of the story.
I want to love life as if it matters
to know what’s at stake,
as if it matters what I do next.
On a Night When My Daughter Is Struggling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, daughter, love, mother, presence, struggle on November 8, 2023| 18 Comments »
I won’t tell her it is up to her
to repair the broken world.
Perhaps that comes later
with pen or needle, pointe shoe or song.
But for now, the thing to do
is to sit together in the broken world
and feel how it is to be broken.
To let shame sit with us.
Let grief sit with us.
To feel the sharp nails of fear.
It is not wrong to feel small,
to feel frightened, to be lost.
Nor must we feel these things alone.
So for now, I sit with her
in the brokenness
with no tools, no salve,
no metaphor of redemption.
It is not enough, perhaps
to meet brokenness
with nothing but love
and breath and a willingness
to be nowhere but here,
but in this broken moment,
it is everything.
One Path Toward Intimacy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, connection, intimacy, puzzle on April 29, 2023| 4 Comments »
Sometimes
a piece
from another
who is broken
finds its way
into my frame,
and our shattered
bits fit
with each other.
Perfectly.
And I am
forever changed.
Here to Be Swallowed Up
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, mushroom, thriving, wholeness on September 2, 2022| 4 Comments »
Part of me thrills to walk in the woods
and find dozens of old king boletes,
their cinnamon caps stretched and blotched,
the yellow sponge of their underbellies
bloated with rain and dappled with dross,
their stems turned to lace by maggots.
There was a time I felt responsible
for gathering them all to eat them, to dry them,
to share them, lest they go to waste.
As if I could ever gather them all.
As if to bloom and thrive
and return to the earth is a waste.
The mushrooms teach me something
of what it is to show up, to give it all
for the sake of giving it all.
I feel so lucky now to find their dark puddles
as they deliquesce.
Soon, there will be no evidence
they were here at all. I leave the woods
no less broken, more whole.
Anti-Lamentation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, grief, music, piano, record player on February 26, 2022| 11 Comments »
There was that summer
when my record player broke,
the needle always returning
to the first song and playing
the whole record again and again,
through morning, through midnight,
and so George Winston’s Winter into Spring
played all through my summer.
Soft and pensive, each melodic phrase
hung spare in the air as if inviting
revelation or breath
before burbling forward like snowmelt.
How I loved that summer,
every moment of it kissed
with chords shattered into arpeggios,
silences and grace notes.
Sometimes breaking brings a gift
we didn’t know we needed,
the way a broken record player
steeped me for months
in the grace of a melancholic beauty
and made the haunting familiar.
The way a broken heart can bring up
a record of beautiful memories,
one after another, day after day,
and somehow heal us by making a masterpiece
of the wreckage.
Temple
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, brokenness, sacred, self image on January 13, 2022| 11 Comments »
O body, cracked bell
that still sings when struck,
O leaky cup,
O broken stem,
I love you, body,
your crooked path,
your crumbling walls,
your faulty math.
I love the way
you stopped believing
you could ever
hold it all,
how you began
to let yourself
become the one
that’s being held.
I love the graffiti
on your inner halls—
scrawled names of all
who shaped you.
O body, my wreck,
my holey glove,
my street worn sole,
my crumpled page,
forgive me for years
of trying to fix you,
for believing the fable
of whole,
you, my perfect
splattered heart,
my stuttered hymn,
my sacred
begging bowl.
What’s in a Broken Cup?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, brokenness, clay, cup, vessel, wine on January 10, 2022| 8 Comments »
Not everything broken
need be fixed.
Even the loveliest cup,
the one that seemed perfection,
the one that fit
just right in the hand
and held the favorite wine,
even that cup is only a cup,
and, being fashioned
out of breakable clay,
it was, we could say,
made to be broken.
The fact it was fragile
was always a part of its value.
In shattered fragments,
the cup is no less
treasured—perhaps
even more treasured now
that its wholeness
isn’t taken for granted.
There are some who
would throw the pieces away.
There are some who
would meet them with
glue or even with gold
in an effort to repair.
But there are some
who will cherish what is broken,
hold it even more tenderly now,
trusting its use—
though different—
is no less valuable.
Trusting a fragment
is sometimes more than enough.
Trusting in every end
is a beginning,
and we might now
sip our wine
straight from the source.
Kintsugi Heart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged broken heart, brokenness, friendship, grief, heart, kintsugi, loss on November 11, 2021| 14 Comments »
After the heart broke like a porcelain bowl,
when it shattered in pieces, scattered,
life itself reassembled the shards.
Friends bring their melted gold
to seal the bits together again.
I trace my fingers across the shining scars.
Some pieces will be missing forever.
Let me fall in love with what has been broken.
Let me dare to call it beautiful.
Permission
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, moon, softening on December 30, 2020| 5 Comments »
Funny on a full moon night
I think about brokenness.
After fifty years of proving
entropy with my life, with
my thoughts, some part of me
still wants to believe in perfection.
I’ve never once thought the moon
any less perfect for being partial.
Tonight, I give myself permission
to be broken. As if I could help it.
But something in the permission
lets me relax, lets me soften
as if I’m covered with moon-drunk snow.
Lets me soften like Erik Satie played low.
Let me see you, the moon seems to say,
just as you are. And I step outside
and the moon slips in.
Bargaining
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, fear, fixing, willingness on September 7, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.
—Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
Brokenness, I am still learning
to embrace you. I would rather fix,
would rather mend, would rather solve.
Today, the hole in my security
is big enough to let fear blow in
like a strong winter wind.
I want a patch, want reinforcement,
want to stitch the seams closed.
And here I am, brokenness,
my needle and thread in hand.
Is it so wrong to want to repair?
My fingers are willing.
There is work to do. Here I am.
Self-Portrait
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bowl, brokenness, poem, poetry, self-portait on January 10, 2019| Leave a Comment »
inside every broken thing
there are wholes—
all that unbreakable emptiness
held in the chipped bowl
One Storm
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, poem, poetry, snow on December 22, 2017| 4 Comments »
Love,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, love, poem, poetry, relationship on August 30, 2015| 1 Comment »
Though I am undeniably broken
I come to you with no need to be fixed.
I come to you the way one river
meets another river—not joining
out of thirst but because
there is so much power
and beauty in giving oneself
to another, in moving
through the world together.
I come to you the way the half moon
comes into the yard—I could be more
whole, but in the meantime,
I will bring you everything
I have.
After Reading of the Goddess Akhilandeshvari, Today Makes a Little More Sense
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Akhilandeshvari, brokenness, love, poem, poetry on March 1, 2014| 3 Comments »
Today there are dozens
of signposts leading me
toward you—the color
of the clouds at the top
of the divide, a song
on the radio, clean scent
of rain—but I do not follow
any of them, do not
make a bouquet of their beautiful
promises. Instead I stay
in this broken place,
crocodiles swim by
and carry on their backs
the countless scattered
shards of who I thought
I was and how I thought
it was supposed to be,
and I love you
from right here.
Trying to Put Humpty Together Again
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brokenness, humpty dumpty, poem, poetry, wholeness on October 16, 2013| 3 Comments »
He cracks himself up. –Julie Cummings
Glue, of course.
Super and Elmer’s
and rubber cement.
Rubber bands.
Scotch tape.
Chicken wire.
String.
A full body cast.
A balancing act.
Affirmations
and hypnotizing.
They told him stories
of how whole he was.
Then offered
St. John’s Wort.
Sublingual B-12.
Calcium citrate
with Vitamin D.
Weeks of physical
therapy. Until
in the end,
Humpty laughed
at them all
and said,
“What a gift
it is to fall.
I love being broken,
it lets in
the light.
See this gold?”
He said,
and then gave it
away.