It’s another vaguely inspirational post from your favorite amateur blogger!  Yay!

Anyway, last fall I went with a few members of the Social Concerns committee to Bo’s Place, a nonprofit located in the Greater Houston area dedicated to helping children who have just lost a loved one.  As I lost two of my grandparents before I was ten, I can tell you that children have a really, really hard time grasping the concept of death (heck, even a lot of older people do.)  They find it hard to comprehend that things will never be the same, because their sibling/parent/pet/etc. isn’t coming back.  And when they do realize that, they face quite a large existential crisis.  They don’t understand how things can be okay if they won’t be the same.

To the end of helping children cope with such a large change in their lives, the staff at Bo’s Place implement many different arts and crafts activities.  One of them is the broken flowerpot.  You start with a regular flowerpot …

(I wanted to put a visual in this post, but I figure most of you already know what a flowerpot looks like.  So, to make this picture interesting, I chose one with kittens, because Internet + kittens = happy.)

You can even paint the flowerpot in any design you wish.  I guess a lot of the kids at Bo’s painted their families the way they remembered them, dead person and all.

Then you drop the flowerpot.  Just smash it on the floor as hard as you can.  In fact, the mere act of destruction can often be therapeutic.  Dropping the flowerpot symbolizes a catastrophic event that triggers shock and grief.

And then (this is the hard part) you glue the pot back together.  Using an infinite amount of patience to pick every shard up off the floor, you have to carefully reconstruct the pot like a 3-D puzzle (personally, I never liked those things) and glue it together, waiting for the glue to dry in between adding pieces.

What you have left after all of this is … a thing.  It’s not the same, since there are bound to be pieces that were lost, and it is hard to glue everything perfectly back in place.  But it still functions as a flowerpot and the random cracks and holes add a certain abstract beauty.  If I were prone to pushing visualizations over the top, I would add that the cracks allow the ~light~ to shine through.

But leaving purple prose and religious metaphors aside for now, I really liked the idea of the broken flowerpot.  It stuck with me after we left Bo’s Place and all the way through winter break.  In fact, I tried halfheartedly to find a terra-cotta pot over winter break, but, oddly enough, December is not a good time to look for gardening supplies.

January was Tu B’Shvat and the Hillel kids painted flowerpots.  With one thing and another, one ended up in the floor common room and was left after school ended and most of the college went home.  I went out to the common room one night and scavenged around for leftover things that were going to be thrown out and came back with a red silk tie, a surge protector, some Christmas tree lights, and the flowerpot.

(I still have all of those things, in case they are yours.)

Gluing the flowerpot back together after I had smashed it was difficult.  I even went to Michael’s to pick up some special pottery glue.  During my first few attempts, the pieces kept falling apart until I was ready to cry with frustration, but I finally figured out that gluing the rim together first, then resting it on my desk so it provided a solid base to work up from, helped me work faster.  When I finished the reconstruction process, I was left with … a thing.  Okay, so some of the pieces didn’t fit perfectly together, and the glue was quite visible.  It wasn’t fine art by any means, but neither was the thing it was supposed to represent.

I’ve had my heart, my body, and my dreams broken a million and one times.  In that, I am no one special.  Each time, I felt like I’d been pushed all the way down to the bottom of Mt. Everest, and each time it grew harder to start the climb back up.  In more relevant terms, I felt like Humpty Dumpty after he got pushed off the wall.

(Random mindblowing fact: the rhyme never mentioned that Humpty Dumpty was an egg.)

What makes me, and you, and everyone else capable of going on after a huge catastrophe is glue, which can be family, friends, pets, career, volunteer work, or school.  The “glue” in this example is anything that holds your life together and gives your existence meaning while you go about trying to patch said existence up.  It fills in the empty parts that you thought would stay empty and makes you structurally sound.

The lowest point of healing has got to be when you realize that nothing will ever be the same and that the whole point of healing is to learn to cope with the new normal, with forever having that phantom pain, with carrying this burden of unfamiliarity.

It’s not the same thing.  But it’s a thing.  It works, and in the right light, it can even be beautiful.

Here’s to all my fellow broken flowerpots.  May you find the right glue to help yourself be strong.

Thanks to J.L. for leaving your flowerpot behind.  You can have it back if you want, but it might not be … the same.  O_O