Shatter
Felice Lavergne
I'm convinced your world should shatter at least every three years. If it doesn't, you're not trying hard enough at living.
A visual
Look: a translucent, glass human-statue with a shriveled up person inside. It looks like a person, but it doesn’t feel like one. Cold to the touch and hollow. If you get close enough you can see a dim glow beneath the mush of organs, but there’s nothing behind the eyes.
Tap, tap.
Empty.
That dim glow, that’s your humanity locked inside useless layers.
Humans are fire. Our greatest invention.
Does our humanity spring from fire, or fire from humanity?
You built up the glass to keep it safe. You forgot: fire needs air.
Your perception of the world should shatter. Not you, yourself. And yet, it is you that shatters.
Do you believe that everyday you’re a new person? Do you carry around some essential thing that is always you?
Is it soul? is it awareness?
But that you, remains intact, freed from its confines. Your essence doesn't need to be contained by glass. It just builds up around you when you’re not looking, or maybe you wanted it there.
This shattering is not death. You don’t get to shuffle off this mortal coil, not this time. Death is when the light goes out, when your dim flame dies - not when illusion shatters. Shattering keeps you firmly in this earthly realm.
As part of this human life, you get to shatter, build up, and shatter again. Over and over.
It’s really hard.
And It gets harder, too, as you get older. You think you have more to lose, and perhaps you do. It may seem insurmountable, but doing what it takes to become the point around which your life revolves, is so sweet. So vital.
Like the candle aphorism: One candle can light many without dimming its own light.
But with your fire, if you keep giving burning logs away...
The average life: a black hole
Sticking to your comfortable worldviews will get you the aforementioned glass-shell of a life. All the good things in the world can be poured over you and you won’t even feel it. Things that used to make you happy, don’t. Everything is swallowed up, sucked in, and spit out.
Keep trying to fill the void. It doesn’t work.
When falling it’s best to relax
Once you become accustomed to feeling nothing it will really take SOMETHING BIG to shake you out of it, to reach you through your layers and layers of glass.
Some purposely constructed, layer by layer; others haphazard lumpy, melted glops.
Life will try, too. Things will keep hitting you in the face.
The truly miserable will ignore the incessant blows and see it as life trying to break them because
“My life sucks.”
It has always sucked.
Life is trying to shatter you. Trying to break you open, to bring you back into the world where there’s light and air. To bring you out of your glass shell - from which you could only sort of see
those layers, they built up
but feel nothing .
Life wants you to be the person who can feel a breeze touch their skin on a sunny day and feel full.
Life isn't gentle, but she knows the path forward, and it doesn’t involve stasis.
I’ve seen people get physically shattered, have open heart surgery, and go back to the way they were before: Red, spitting little balls of pain and anger. Alternately, I’ve seen a person get West Nile, go into a coma and come out the other side as grateful as we hope we’d all be. Expand or contract. Relax or tense. Shatter or be shattered.
Fire: A classic metaphor for life, a how to
When your fire is smoldering kindling it doesn’t have enough energy to really burn. To ignite, blow gently on your kindling, addling little twigs, dry moss, grass - whatever is at hand. Tend your fire like it’s the most precious thing in the world, watching constantly. Is it ready for larger branches? Does it need more time to grow? Add more on this side, or that.
It takes some time. While the fire is small anything might put it out. Once ablaze, your fire is not easily smothered.
Please, breathe life into you. Shatter.
