Tending the broken thing

I am not here to be healed--I am here to be alive.

Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried - Megan Devine

Sometimes I feel myself rather unfortunate, walking the spiritual path of the poet; self-pity, it seems, comes with the territory. But it is a jovial sort of self-pity, a sort of sincere-ironic love of one’s own melancholia that a poetic dharma entails. Don’t cry for me, Argentina. I have plenty of tears for myself. The poet Orpheus was only blessed by the gods out of pity; he lost his beloved as a consequence of his own foolish actions, a gift inseparable from a curse.

This is precisely why most post-modern spiritual advice—which is as divorced from most earth-based wisdom as the modern and even the traditional—does nothing for me. When I came across the above quote, it was in the midst of some insomniatic late-night doomscrolling, my eyes feeling mildly assaulted by all of the mediocre fast-food spiritual advice that everyone feels qualified to give these days. If this, then that—so don’t this. You just need to this, then you’ll be happy. If you feel anything at all that isn’t satisfaction, even for a fraction of a second, well, aren’t you just a low-vibe idiot rife with negative beliefs.

This is a more postmodern, relativistic spiritual ideology—we create our own reality, and thus we are responsible if our reality doesn’t feel perfect, as it obviously should. This is empowering, to a certain degree. It allows us to see how much mastery we have over what narratives, thoughts, and emotions we let inform our perception of things…and when this is not tempered with a sense of cold, hard realism, we get bypassing.

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I love a good therapeutic mythology. What I don’t love is a therapeutic mythology that isn’t self-aware—that doesn’t know it’s a coping mechanism, that mistakes itself for reality. Because when I look at the world around me, I don’t see a perfect world. I see a hot mess and a half. I see not only violence, but a denial of violence as an aspect of human nature. I see not only mental illness, but a society that defines “sanity” as the capacity to adapt to systems that are destructive and unsustainable. I see not only infrastructure collapse, but a collective freeze response around that collapse—I see a collective staring in horror and disbelief, desperately wanting anything but what is actually true to be true.

Why, should we convince ourselves to experience an untruth so great, and so harmful, as perfection? Are we not strong enough to be with the brokenness, the pollution, the confusion? Need it all make sense, need it all fit together? From my perspective, nothing makes sense, and nothing is okay.

Here lies the issue I have with modern and post-modern conceptions of what it means to heal and be healed. We think of life as a race to the finish line, we believe that we can heal all our trauma, forgive our parents, our abusers, our exes, and skip happily ever after into the distance with our soul mate. Voila! We’ve won at life! We finally deserve to feel good about ourselves!

Reality is, unfortunately, far messier than that. Reality isn’t always so easily split into victims and abusers. Grief processes are very rarely linear. Our emotions are often disproportionate to the circumstances that evoked them. And no amount of “healing” can get rid of the dissonance between the part of us that wants to have it all figured out, and the part of us that knows we never really can.

Orpheus mourning Eurydice. Artist unknown.

Additionally, this conception of spiritual healing is rather ableist. It assumes that our lives are supposed to look flowing, open, easy, and obvious, all the time—if we’re doing it right. And, if we’re doing it wrong…well, reality punishes us by not giving us what we want, by making us sick, by withholding nourishment and connection and fulfilment until we get our shit together. But the shit we need to get together, it doesn’t just belong to us. Most of us carry generations upon generations of unprocessed pain, pain that goes far beyond our individual human lives. The state of human civilisation is far from stable. Of course our body-minds are overwhelmed. We simply cannot hold more than we can hold.

And trust me, I am doing all the things. I journal, I meditate, I chant, I paint, I cry, I read books about ancestral healing and indigenous wisdom. Still, the broken thing will not budge—because it knows, in its own metaphorical heart of hearts, that it has a right to be here as much as the joy and the bliss. It knows, and it demands to be seen.

During meditation, I don’t always make it to a state of pure bliss or pure consciousness. I very often think of or somatically experience my own death. Or, a traumatic memory resurfaces. I have disturbing visions. I don’t want to clear my mind, I want to befriend it–every crevice, every shadow. I am the only one who can, the only one who will. I trust my system to show me and bring me what I need to see. I don’t make my anxiety wrong. I don’t try to escape it through “healing.” Not anymore. 

I believe that each life is a ritual, or at least is meant to be treated as such. Rites of initiation, of feast, of fast–-these exist to mark the natural ups and downs, the break-ups, the breakdowns, and the intermittent bursts of creative power that these less-than-ideal circumstances give to us. Ritual is not just about partying, it’s not just about joy. It is about tending the broken thing, and finding some way to dance even in its presence. It's finding some way to say yes. Yes, you are wounded. Yes, you are tired—but you belong. Ritual is here to meet complexity, chaos, ordeal, death, and say to it: 'welcome, friend.'

I am not here to be healed. I am here to set bones and wash blood from the knees of crying children. I am here to love and be loved, even as I am broken again and again. Fragmentation is not an enemy of wholeness. I am and always will be partially incomplete, for I belong to a world that is more vast than I alone can conceive. There is so much I do not know, so much that I will never know. There are so many people whom I have mindlessly damaged, so many who have mindlessly damaged me. This beloved green earth, she is irreversibly damaged. Can we love her not in spite of this, but because of it? Can we meet her where she is, even as it rocks us to our very cores?

Let us be damaged, for it is life that does so to us. It is rupture that leads us to repair. It is repair that leads to resilience. Our world is falling apart, and with it she takes our fantasies of healing, of perfection, of smoothed mountains and mowed lawns.

As such, let me be ugly as I cry. Let me scream as I give birth. 

I am not here to look pretty. I am here to be alive. 

1. Does reality exist outside of the mind of the observer? I believe so. Doesn’t mean I know what I’m talking about.