Repair Shop – Staring at our Wounds
I read this quote on Instagram recently and it hit:
“But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.”
— Haruki Murakami
In the header photo (please read in the browser to see if you’re in the newsletter), there is a detail of Pan from the Capitoline Museum in Rome, I took in December of 2023. And below is the context. I have been staring at these wounds for some time, these repairs, the way things hold together.
The cracks and gouges are everywhere in Rome. They’re everywhere everywhere. There is a line in a book I love. It’s Lovability by Emily Kendal Frey. She says:
“That I would be responsible for saving myself still lands in the pile of Great Indignities.”
And of course it’s an indignity. It is. And we will, we do, stare at our wounds forever with our chipped up eyes. But I refuse not to save myself. I refuse not to be elegant, even if in an undignified way.
Look at the wound on this foot below that looks like a bandaid. I mean we talk about things like, “oh, it’s just a bandaid solution.” Well, let’s have at least that. At least that. That’s also something to contemplate, however long it sticks.
There’s a lot of poetry on wounds, no big surprise. Like “The Wound” by Lauren Shapiro which begins:
And when the flower opens its wound?
And when the wound is mortal, fanned out
like makeup spilled from a purse?
And it's always your one and only wound,
the one you keep coming back to?
The Wound
by Thomas Hardy
I climbed to the crest,
And, fog-festooned,
The sun lay west
Like a crimson wound:
Like that wound of mine
Of which none knew,
For I’d given no sign
That it pierced me through.
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Matt Licata says in his book A Healing Space, the “healing will always surprise us.” He says falling apart is a “sacred process.” And this falling apart is “evidence” where in which “the known crumbles and disintegrates, revealing important and lesser-known dimensions of our experience not available during times of clear reflection and “holding it all together.”” Our old ways and ideas of who we thought we were “just can’t contain us any longer; they’re not subtle, nuanced, or magnificent enough.” Transformation is surprising he says, and I can’t disagree given all that I’ve witnessed these past years.
There’s a lot of rubble out there. From which you are required to make something beautiful. There you go — I worked in the tagline for my blog! I really have loved staring at wounds, yours, mine, the wounds of anyone who shows them to me. (I’ve seen so so many!) I think we’ve been changed, many of us, and haven’t we learned things we never would have otherwise? Good for writers, perhaps. Reminds me of the well-known poem by Rumi titled “The Guest House”:
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Translated by Coleman Barks
Maybe we could take a break from our wounds, though now. Are they holding? Are the bandaids and repairs and attempted healing giving us a break right now? Can we take a moment and admire our subtle magnificence?
Wishing you a good, really good, week ahead.
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