Shattering

My hematite ring broke in the bathroom last night and last week my golden labradorite ring broke and both times I was intoxicated but that’s not what I’m pointing towards. I wear crystal jewelry as a talisman, as armor, as adornment. Every time a piece breaks or falls off my body, it’s an omen. Either a gift from me to the universe or a gift from the universe to me – like breathing, it becomes reciprocal. Shards of hematite in a blacklight graffiti bathroom like Cinderella’s lost slipper, breadcrumbs for the universe rather than for a prince charming. At once a gift from me and a gift to me; a lesson from the universe in learning to let go, to let what no longer serves you to shatter.

To let what no longer serves you to shatter.

There’s a quote by Rumi: “The wound is the place where Light enters you.” How else would light penetrate your being?

In the Japanese practice of Kintsugi, broken pottery is mended with lacquer dusted with powdered gold. To take something that’s cracked and reconstruct the cracks with gold. Once jagged edges mold together again and the gold cracks take on the image of veins, of rivers, of the very thing that keeps us alive, pulsing prana. The shards, the cracks, are small opportunities to work the magic of mending. The practice of discerning what, in being shattered, is a lesson in letting go. And what, in being shattered, is a lesson in mending.