We arrive in the world in a simple completion. Born in the bareness of our being. Present to the touch, taste, sights, and sounds in the newness of our becoming. “An innocent wholeness,” Robert A. Johnson says, “in which the inner world and the outer world are united.”
But somewhere along the way a severance between the inner and outer occurs. Sometimes it’s in the slow wear of the world’s expectations. Sometimes in the violent hacks and stabs of another person’s judgments. Sometimes in the brutal tears we give to ourselves. We experience what Johnson calls “life’s duality,” and we hide the tender shape of our hearts behind the mask we show to the world.
When it happens it feels like loss. It feels like grief. Because it is. We crumble into fragments and absences under the pressure and weight of pushing our insides away from the outside world. The broken pieces leave a trail.
I think about who I thought I was. Who I thought I’d be. The life that felt within reach. The pieces and parts that slipped and cracked before they were ever gained.
There’s an enlightenment that can happen in the desolate places of fractured things. A jagged-edged redemption. A grace that’s unafraid to bleed. It’s what art is. It’s what art does. It’s the collage I can create from the dislocated remnants of all that was and what will never be.
Everything we lost. Everything taken. Stripped from the origins of wholeness and context and given a second chance at becoming something wholly other and new. It is “a conscious reconciliation of the inner and outer,” Johnson says — an unresolved tension embraced by harmony.
When a swirl of incoherent thoughts are given structure and safety. When every feeling is found in the form of tangibility. A picture held together by more than the worth of a thousand words. An elegance of stability, lament, and mercy.
The moment when the inner and outer worlds become a different kind of wholeness than we’ve ever been.
This is what happens in the process of making things.
May your inner world find form in all you make.
May the fragments be all you need to find wholeness.
May what you build become the home that always welcomes you.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
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