The Cracks Are Where the Light Comes In
"Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." –Leonard Cohen
A reset. A rebirth. A recommitment. You can't get through these processes without first destroying or laying to rest a body of something. Maybe that "body" is a bundle of beliefs or a construct with a foundation built deeply within the behavioral bedrock of our conditioned selves. Maybe it's a form created in part from prejudices, assumptions, and expectations which are unverified and undeserved, but when the foundation shows cracks, how do we respond?
There is this incredible Japanese pottery art, perhaps you've heard of it called Kintsugi ("golden repair") where bowls are intentionally broken and healed back together with urushi and liquid gold. The cracks become opportunities to actually strengthen the bowl, like a broken bone that becomes fortified via new mineral deposits. The strengthening, the healing, can only enter once the vessel is broken out of its original design and once it is reformed, though it resembles the original intention of the design, it will never be the same again. It is now a work of art.
Cass and I often remark that it's as though we've been in our relationship for a year or more, though it's only been 6 months. Though she says it's important to note that we are on the "advanced track" because we've practically spent every day of that 6 months together continually. But we remark on this illusion of time because sometimes we're experiencing the profound unconditional love that seems impossible to build in such short order. And sometimes it's because we've challenged each other to grow immensely in short order and have fulfilled that order for one another post haste.
We've had 3 major relationship ruptures/resets/rebirths/recommitments and we feel closer now than at any time before. Not because of trauma bonding but because we've stayed committed–devoted to be remade anew via the gifts our conflicts yield. This is a process of purification. In order to love well, we have had to lay to rest our codependent and narcissistic structures which remained in-tact—undiscovered through our past awakenings and relationship reckonings. To build a new relationship with the personal work none of us can really touch until we have something powerful at stake. Something deeply intimate and deeply caring that's capable of walking us into the dark valleys of the broken and the undiscovered. We can walk there courageously if we are assured there is a beautiful piece of art awaiting us amidst the chaos of shattered pieces.
As humans busy being humans, we don't often take note that our soul-craft is nothing more than love-craft and that the grand purpose of our lives is at least to make art with the liquid gold of our love. We can lose sight that, relationship-craft is the path of perfecting our love-craft, if only we would take the seat of the responsible creator—the crafter apprentice of our relational experience. The choice architect in charge of our own interpretations, beliefs, responses, and broadcasts which shape our own egos and the egos of those we are influencing—like a potter spinning clay. And when we realize we've been crafting something that isn't aligned with our highest good, our highest love; we must be willing to smash that vessel upon the ground. Not to destroy it completely, but to redeem it; from a flawed vessel into a representation of strength and beauty.
Without consequences, how can we learn from our actions? Aren't consequences at the core of the karmic reckoning we have incarnated on Earth to confront? By creating and reinforcing love-encouraging standards—walls that protect the rarified, precious inner sanctum of our temple-gardens of self-love—we aren't opposing the ones we love. We are loving them into growth. We are evolving them. By creating a meaningful obstacle, we are helping them train in the high arts; in the mastery of love-craft which is measured in-kind by how much they respect the walls that seem to punish. If those boundaries are created with love in mind, they aren't our humiliation. They are our helpers. In spiritual reality, they are often forms of precise feedback our blind-spot-laden egos need to promote change. Customized perspectives which must be taken in and owned—called out and called in—in order to gain the wisdom needed to scale the wall growth requires. In order to enter the temple with integrity. And if we don't call in, if we don't claim these change-goals for ourselves, as our own self-interested prerogative, we will end up resenting the wall builders who want nothing more than the best for all beings considered.
You are a precious gatekeeper—a guardian of love who encourages, nay demands the utmost in loving respect in order to keep their temple pure. And hopefully you are surrounded by other such gatekeepers holding you to account as well. As the Cohen song quoted at the beginning of this post says, "Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering." I think of a call to dispose of what our mind has envisioned purity to represent as some lofty dreamscape and grab for what's right in front of you.
What, right in front of you now, is blocking you from offering your purity of love? What are you allowing to steal away a deep regard for yourself, the other and for the Mysterium Tremendum in the next moment? If you're fortunate enough, it will be shown to you by a caring other and you'll carefully take it out, examine it closely, and smash it on the ground. So the gold can enter.
