what it all means
Haphazard. Half-shattered. Roughly assembled. Poorly hewn. Life comes to you cobbled together. Something already shaped, already gathered, already put in place. We don’t get a say. We have almost no control. It’s something into which we are thrown. Without explanation. Without connotation. Our context. Our culture. This time. This place. This cage.
And yet, our one “inviolable freedom”, Barbara Brown Taylor says, is getting to decide what it all means. We get to make the meaning of everything.
Meaning doesn’t come to us prepackaged and already fashioned. No owner’s manual or operating instructions. Assembly is required but we do it blindly. In the crooked places where things don’t meet evenly or seamlessly is where we find it hiding. In the fragments and debris. We piece it together, awkwardly, clumsily, imperfectly, from the bruise-colored wreckage of broken things.
We take all the unasked for givenness of our lives, of where we are now, of where we have been, of where we might one day be, and we stubbornly insist that the disarray can be rearranged. That something in this mess means more than anything. That the accumulated weight of what once looked like anarchy is, in fact, our source of our mattering.
May the fragments you inherit become the courage you inhabit
May you always make meaning from the things that never promised it.
May you always be a work progressing.
In case no one’s told you today I love you with all my everything.
May we always be able to, from time to time, step aside to see the larger picture. May we keep our minds open.
Love these works here, Duane, xx
Thank you- so poignant to the work I am
Making atm; old black and white photos of family long gone, some I knew , many I did not ; making meaning with an unknown and lost past