I've been thinking a little about brokenness. I'm somewhat broken myself at the moment (Today's symptom: coughing stuff up. Made erging this morning a bit trickier) but it's minor and mostly easily ignored now, and though it seems to have been hanging on forever (for values of "forever equalling 3.5 weeks) I know it will go away relatively soon. I've been lucky enough so far to have only health issues that are trivial, or at least easily cured when caught soon enough.
Melissa wrote recently about a more powerful and far more permanent brokenness. I'd say that she broke open like an eggshell in bringing new life to the world, but that's not an appropriate image. We throw broken eggshells away. The best metaphor I can think of is a powerful rock, broken open when a spring breaks through it. Even though it's cleft by the strem, the rock itself is just as strong as it was before, though it and the stream will continue to shape each other over time. And most people would say that a rock with a spring coming from it is more beautiful and sustaining than the unbroken rock ever was.
There's also someone I've recently encountered online for whom one of the first words that comes to mind is "broken". I won't link to her for fear my words could be taken as an isult. They're not meant to be. In this case it's her mind and spirit that are broken, and the damage is either endemic to her or comes from early in her life. I call her "broken" because a lot of things that are routine or easy for most people are difficult for her; there seems to be a disconnect between her and the world that makes it difficult for her to understand other people or even herself. I don't think the brokenness is her fault or anything she can easily fix, and I've come to admire her for her struggles to deal with the world in spite of it. From what I've seen, I think she's been remarkably successful, more so that I think she realizes. She has love in her life, and productive work, and a good sense of her own problems, which is more than a lot of people dealt better hands can say.
There's an old saying that scar tissue is stronger than undamaged tissue. I don't know whether it's literally true, but figuratively, I think it is.
Posted by dichroic at August 1, 2006 01:25 PM