You know, sometimes life doesn't make sense. It feels random and leaves us with more questions than answers. But I've learned it's a good place to be. If I allow it, it opens my heart to learning some amazing things. I'd love to have you come along and together, take a look at things like leadership, relationship, and my very favorite...listening to the stories of others with a heart for truth. ***This podcast features music by Scott Holmes including the titles "Think Different," "Deep Thinker Logo," "Celebration" and "Corporate Vision" available under a Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial license.
Music by Scott Holmes - A Wee Tipple Non Copyright Music
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Kinsugi, the Japanese art of putting back together broken pieces of pottery, using a lacquer from tree bark, gold, silver, and other precious metals. It's an art form specifically for repair, for rebuilding what was fractured and bringing beauty to what was considered useless. I have such a small bowl in my room. I do not think it's authentic, but it does sit as a reminder of the potential for beauty when sitting in the aftermath of a life in ruins. And recently one morning, as I was getting ready for work, I was drawn to it even more than usual. I picked it up and studied it, quietly listening for the message within. My attention was drawn to how the gold only appears where it once was broken. No other area of the bowl is filled with the lacquer and gold. Interesting. What if the very area where we failed, where mistakes were made, where everything we were and hoped for fell short? What if those places actually get filled with something precious, something that causes them to shine? What if in the process of healing and repair, something extraordinarily rare and deeply good is waiting to be added to our lives and allows us to be whole in a way we never imagined. I'll never forget when many years ago I was introduced to those lyrics from Leonard Cohen's song, Anthem. Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There's a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. I wept when those lyrics were read to me. The very idea that the imperfections in me, the mistakes and failures of my life, actually allow the light to get in, did not lessen the pain of it all, but at the same time was somehow deeply comforting. I had been taught that imperfection and failure would block out love, that getting it wrong would count me out of being cared for, and when I or someone else messed up, the reactions of others assured me that was true. But what if, as those lyrics say, it's how the light gets in? It's actually the entry point to a more meaningful life, a narrow way, so to speak, a secret passage not easily found and not walked by many. But who can blame them? Who would want to walk through failure, through life falling apart, through a living hell? But then again I found hell has many forms, and maybe the cracks, a life fallen apart, eventually leads me out of them. The lyrics from Anthem continue. You can add up the parts, you won't have the sum. You can strike up the march, there is no drum. Every heart, every heart to love will come, but like a refugee. How I get to love, to real love, is not by being a flawless pottery jar. How I get to wholeness is not through perfection or being some paragon of virtue. It's not through being faultless or irreproachable. That's only pretense. I get to being filled with what's rare and precious through my mistakes, through not having it all together, through being broken open. Instead of working to get to the light, to love, the failures in life allow the light, allow what is deeply meaningful to get to me. Imagine that.
