Crumbles

I’ve been preoccupied lately with the image of things crumbling: dynasties, empires, and whole cultures, as well as ideologies within them - but also egos, dreams, relationships, well-developed plans, physical abilities, and even…cookies. When crumbs of any kind spray apart like little pieces of shot from a shotgun, they will never again be the same as before the trigger was pulled (or the dream shattered). As the saying goes, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Physical life seems to be about living in a crumbled state to some degree, recognizing the mysterious little crumbly-and-broken pieces of the everyday, gathering and re-gathering them even though they refuse to fit together perfectly, waiting for them to shape something beyond the here-and-now deep in our hearts. Physical death, conversely, is about rigor mortis.

When I am broken, eventually something emerges out of the crumbles that I never saw before. Maybe it is a different kind of life; maybe it is Life itself, and everything else was just a prettily-shaped-and-stamped, enticing-looking Oreo waiting to be dunked in milk, waiting for the crumbly part to break off and swim around and get all soggy and even disintegrate, waiting to completely change and transform, even in an elemental way.

I am there today, once again: more crumbly than ever, waiting for more love and wisdom and grace.