Broken Reflections

Broken

What story do you see?

Memories – Transitions – Disclosure – Revelation – Discovery

Outside it seems tragic.  Once a place of productive work, now abandoned.  Purposeless.  Reminders of life that no longer thrives.  Broken.  Shattered.  Empty. Black tears staining pink skin below the rusted frames, weeping for the loss.

But maybe it says something else.

When the glass was whole, the inside and outside were kept apart by an invisible wall.  This place couldn’t breathe.  The life inside needed artificial sustenance.  Artificial light.  Artificial air.  Artificial—everything.  It had meaning because it created obligation and when the obligation was no longer necessary, life and meaning left.  All that time the world was kept away.  There were no holes in the whole.  The work inside, the sense of purpose, the meaning of all those interior actions, could not escape its voluntary, unconscious prison.  We went to work, as if work had a life of its own, as if work was the meaning of our being there, the meaning of us!

Age overcame pretension.  Now this place, this once captive market of isolation, lives in a different way.  Its beauty is not artificial.  The dark inside is accessible, eking its way into the light because it is broken.  Its beauty is its destruction, the collapse of the isolation inside.  Now we see the black tears staining the outside wall, crying over the lost dreams, for what they are: the unreality of work apart from the world outside.  The factory is finished.  A birthing begins.  Transformation.

What is in that dark interior?  What do we want to see?  Projections of our own outward reality?  Is it empty, or filled with mystery?  Is it the deep center of our outward journey or a reminder of loss?  Are we outside because we have chosen to let the dark break its barriers, or are we outside because the purpose we once embraced has faded into death.  Who occupies that dark place now?  Our ghosts or our glimpses of beginnings, of past journeys aiming for something outside that labor dungeon?  What does the broken wall of glass disclose?

We were inside once, locked away in that dark space, believing we knew what life meant, working for some end that no longer matters.  The pink skin of that world pretended to protect us, promised to provide, to punctuate the problems of our lives with monetary exclamation points.  But the end came.  The doors closed.  The workers we were withered.  The world broke in, shattered those pretentious projections of purpose and left us probing the dark mysteries of our past.  Wondering how these holes help us become whole.  Wondering why we once worried about what doesn’t matter now.  A revelation in failed fabrication.  A poem waiting to be written in black tears on pink concrete.  We will write it—new lyrics to an ancient tune winding its way out of the dark.

Weep with this monument of disclosure.  Then dry your tears.  Life is not inside, in the brooding dark of past shattered memories.  Life is here, outside—seeing the dark interior, the black skin stains, standing in a story that continues, that knows where it began and why it cannot remain behind an abandoned origin.  Now we are in a place of perspective, viewing the alphabet of the broken edges.  What it says is what we need it to say—if we’re ready to read.

“Pain travels through families until someone is ready to feel it.” – Stephi Wagner, Healing the Mother Wound