BROKENNESS. BEAUTY. COMMUNITY.
One day you are going about your life, managing your daily calendar when, without warning… in an instant… everything is no longer familiar.
In an instant, shards of your life as you once knew it lay before you, as if you were watching a dish fall from your hands in slow motion, shattering on the floor into several unrecognizable bits and pieces. Whether the news is a cancer diagnosis, a sudden death of a loved one or anything else bringing you to your knees, life as you knew it becomes unrecognizable.
This. This scenario is the very reason the making of a mosaic has intrigued me. A mosaic, literally, is picking up broken fragments and rearranging them together to connect with something much greater than you could have imagined.
Broken open and remade.
Lily Yeh wrote of the broken parts of herself, “It is really through the depth of living, the chaos, the brokenness that I find peace. Joy is rooted in the depth of our suffering. It is out of my own brokenness, and the brokenness of others in the darkest of places, that I find that sense of joy.”
I know it may be difficult to comprehend finding joy in the depths of brokenness, especially when you are deep in the trenches of your suffering. But I can tell you emphatically, in the last nine years since opening the Center, I have witnessed just that…many finding joy again after loss. Several have disclosed making new discoveries of their inner light and acquiring a deeper sense of gratitude. I have come to observe in others at the Center the re-igniting of hope and finding more significance in life after having been broken open.
And…a few weeks ago that is exactly what we symbolically accomplished together. Jennifer Iams-McGuire taught us how to break pieces of stone and glass in creating a most exquisite piece of profound art. It took twenty-seven pairs of hands, most of which have never made a mosaic, over a period of two days to break, place, glue back together and grout the many shards of textiles all the while having rich conversations across the landscape of our artwork as it took form. These conversations were illuminated in light and color. A symbol of healing, consciously and unconsciously, emerged, serving as a sacred rite of passage to experience wholeness and the power of community.
Our community art project emphasized what we can achieve collectively. Wellness Within as most of you know is a community within a community.
Art can heal the seen and unseen. Art like food, movement and meditation is an additional form of medicine to add to your arsenal.
Intrigued? Consider adding art as another healing balm for your mind, body and spirit.
If you haven’t been to the Center lately, please stop by and enjoy our mosaic hanging in our entryway.
In Light and love,
Patti