A DREADED MESSAGE arrived this morning in my inbox—a message about a handmade terracotta jug that broke in transit from Skokie to Madison. How sad! How tragic. I'd wrapped it so carefully, first in thick brown packing paper, and then in layers of recycled bubble wrap, in a box with more paper and bubble wrap, with careful attention paid to the handle and rim.
And yet, and yet. The item broke. Despite all my fragile stickers plastered all over the tidy box, taped and taped again for added security. The postal service is pretty good, for the most part, but occasionally this happens and it always fills me with feelings of disappointment, for sender and receiver alike.
I fully refunded the client and then went on to file a claim with the post office. These days, it's easy to submit a claim with photos and usually, they honor it.
But it's never about the money, is it? Money comes, and money goes, it flows. But this old jug that has survived for many years and passed through many hands, has finally broken into parts.
The woman in Madison was still hopeful that she could glue it back together—to restore it back to its original form—but the fact that it had still broken had me feeling down this morning as I washed the dishes. I wished for the existence of a more fragile mail service, where carriers hold each package in their hands the whole way, never having to touch a conveyor belt or get tossed with disregard into a cavernous bin.
Have you seen how your package gets thrown like a football across the backroom of a post office, from one bin to the next? It's kind of wild. It's a miracle and a wonder that anything we send arrives whole anymore, to the next state or across the country!
I'm grateful that the buyer was understanding, overall, but I still feel a twinge of regret after I get a message like this, a feeling that I could have packaged it better, wrapped it with even more care, taken more time to ensure that brokenness would never even be an option.
But we all know brokenness is an inevitability when it comes to humans and our objects. Nothing lasts forever, not the objects or our bodies and beings. I sometimes stop to ponder the energetic trajectory of a broken thing—the slow motion arc from whole to broken, invisible to the human eye, and yet, somehow set in motion before we've even had time for an intervention.
My sister has a favorite plate. She texted us the other day to tell us that it had broken in the kitchen. Just like that, whole to broken in a flash. And we talked about how its brokenness had already been set in motion earlier that morning, but she wasn't yet aware of it, and I totally understood what she meant—the object is on its own path from nothing to something to fragments.
I've been reading a lot about quantum physics recently, attempting to understanding consciousness, the limits and possibilities of it. We learn about how entropy is the default state—all things stumbling toward states of decay. Life energy is the counterforce to this fact of entropy—we have to work toward and for life to sustain it—it's not a given.
So we tend to our objects to extend their lives as best we can, even in this throw-away culture, even in this time of abundance and waste, many of us still attempt this tending to the things that need our care and attention.
And yet, despite our best efforts, things break.
I think about that Pablo Neruda poem, his "Ode to Broken Things." I wrote about teaching this poem to fourth graders long ago, for Teachers and Writers magazine.
In the poem, "Neruda makes peace with all things broken; he portrays brokenness as a state as natural as wholeness. Things get broken, and it is no one’s fault:
It’s not my hands
or yours
It wasn’t the girls
with their hard fingernails
or the motion of the planet.
I remember how my students helped me make a list of all kinds of things that break, not just objects: friendships, promises, glass, bones, toys, hearts, families, memories, trust, numbers, time, love, borders, laws, innocence, trees, vases, bodies, buildings, plates, war.
What are we supposed to do with all this brokenness?
Neruda's idea:
Let’s put all our treasures together
—the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold—
into a sack and carry them
to the sea
and let our possessions sink
into one alarming breaker
that sounds like a river.
May whatever breaks
be reconstructed by the sea
with the long labor of its tides.
But sometimes, it's not so simple. To glue a jug back together is one thing. It's the ultimate expression of the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, to honor and elevate the beauty of imperfection and impermanence. But how do we stitch back together the brokenness of borders that break apart lovers, or systems that separate families, laws that lend themselves to longing, wars that wear down the heart's capacity to feel compassion?
Living in these times has tested our ability to hold space for other's suffering, allow for the stories that contradict our own, grant grace to actions that feel safe to some and a threat to others. I hear it in my friends' voices—the weariness, the impatience, the exasperation of these days—how do we hang on amidst so much brokenness?
I could wax poetic about the Jewish mystical notion of tikkun olam, repairing the world, which frames brokenness as an essential part of the human creation story.
According to 16th century mystics, God created the world with vessels that contained divine light. These vessels shattered, scattering these sparks of light into the material world. Each of us has the mystical and moral task of performing good deeds as a way to gather these sparks of light, repairing the fractured universe and moving toward harmony and wholeness.
It's a powerful idea—one with an organizing force behind it—to act with loving kindness in the direction of justice.
But how do we make sense of the current inertia of this calling, to restore and repair an inherently broken world?
In Upside-Down Love, a memoir told in two voices by Israeli lawyer Sari Bashi and her Palestinian partner, Omar, I read about the brokenness of Israel and Palestine, the barriers to movement among Palestinians, the impossibility of comprehension on either side to imagine the pain of the other, the extreme sense of threat on all sides, the sense of this threat as infinite and eternal, baked into the stories that steer us in one direction or the other.
The book details the way Sari and Omar attempt a love affair and marriage in this climate, against all the odds, and describes how the brokenness is so baked into their existence, the idea of its opposite doesn't even exist anymore.
"For Palestinians, it's impossible not to break the law, because everything is illegal," Bashi writes.
"And because everything is illegal, most of the laws are not enforced, because you can't really outlaw living. So every Palestinian, by virtue of being Palestinian, lives in a state of perpetual criminality."
She lives in Tel Aviv, her partner lives in Ramallah, a place forbidden to all Israelis. But Omar, as a Gazan, can't live in Tel Aviv, so Sari decides to take the risk to live with Omar in Ramallah.
"I can't observe the commas of the military order that forbids Israeli citizens from entering the city of Ramallah because they have placed my love outside the bounds of the law, and that's a law I have chosen to break."
Since October 7, I have remained silent in public spaces about my feelings toward Israel, the genocidal war in Gaza, the heartache of Jewish connection to such a contested land. There's nothing useful I can say online that would repair or restore anything.
But reading has been a balm for me, reading stories about Palestinian lives and Israeli lives alike, and trying to allow my heart to feel into the corners, creases, and cracks that social media can't see and won't touch and doesn't reflect—the in-between spaces where life keeps unfolding—between people, families, communities.
That's where the golden threads course through the broken parts. I'm not saying this with much elegance or grace, but that's what I feel at this moment, that repair and healing happen in these very subtle, silence places without words or language.
Sometimes the breakage is so big, a claim feels like a joke. It's never about the money, is it? It's about saying I'm sorry for the state of its brokenness, and doing what one can to make the situation a little better, a little more manageable, a little less devastating, less disappointing.
I wish that jug hadn't broken in the mail. It was a beauty, someone made it with painstaking attention and care. It's broken now, and the refund has been sent. The woman in Madison thanked me. We both went on with our lives.
But once-whole jug is still broken. Perhaps she'll glue it back together again, or not. But I like to believe that the way the two of us handled the broken thing with care says something about what's possible yet between humans in this very broken world.
And yet, and yet. The item broke. Despite all my fragile stickers plastered all over the tidy box, taped and taped again for added security. The postal service is pretty good, for the most part, but occasionally this happens and it always fills me with feelings of disappointment, for sender and receiver alike.
I fully refunded the client and then went on to file a claim with the post office. These days, it's easy to submit a claim with photos and usually, they honor it.
But it's never about the money, is it? Money comes, and money goes, it flows. But this old jug that has survived for many years and passed through many hands, has finally broken into parts.
The woman in Madison was still hopeful that she could glue it back together—to restore it back to its original form—but the fact that it had still broken had me feeling down this morning as I washed the dishes. I wished for the existence of a more fragile mail service, where carriers hold each package in their hands the whole way, never having to touch a conveyor belt or get tossed with disregard into a cavernous bin.
Have you seen how your package gets thrown like a football across the backroom of a post office, from one bin to the next? It's kind of wild. It's a miracle and a wonder that anything we send arrives whole anymore, to the next state or across the country!
I'm grateful that the buyer was understanding, overall, but I still feel a twinge of regret after I get a message like this, a feeling that I could have packaged it better, wrapped it with even more care, taken more time to ensure that brokenness would never even be an option.
But we all know brokenness is an inevitability when it comes to humans and our objects. Nothing lasts forever, not the objects or our bodies and beings. I sometimes stop to ponder the energetic trajectory of a broken thing—the slow motion arc from whole to broken, invisible to the human eye, and yet, somehow set in motion before we've even had time for an intervention.
My sister has a favorite plate. She texted us the other day to tell us that it had broken in the kitchen. Just like that, whole to broken in a flash. And we talked about how its brokenness had already been set in motion earlier that morning, but she wasn't yet aware of it, and I totally understood what she meant—the object is on its own path from nothing to something to fragments.
I've been reading a lot about quantum physics recently, attempting to understanding consciousness, the limits and possibilities of it. We learn about how entropy is the default state—all things stumbling toward states of decay. Life energy is the counterforce to this fact of entropy—we have to work toward and for life to sustain it—it's not a given.
So we tend to our objects to extend their lives as best we can, even in this throw-away culture, even in this time of abundance and waste, many of us still attempt this tending to the things that need our care and attention.
And yet, despite our best efforts, things break.
I think about that Pablo Neruda poem, his "Ode to Broken Things." I wrote about teaching this poem to fourth graders long ago, for Teachers and Writers magazine.
In the poem, "Neruda makes peace with all things broken; he portrays brokenness as a state as natural as wholeness. Things get broken, and it is no one’s fault:
It’s not my hands
or yours
It wasn’t the girls
with their hard fingernails
or the motion of the planet.
I remember how my students helped me make a list of all kinds of things that break, not just objects: friendships, promises, glass, bones, toys, hearts, families, memories, trust, numbers, time, love, borders, laws, innocence, trees, vases, bodies, buildings, plates, war.
What are we supposed to do with all this brokenness?
Neruda's idea:
Let’s put all our treasures together
—the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold—
into a sack and carry them
to the sea
and let our possessions sink
into one alarming breaker
that sounds like a river.
May whatever breaks
be reconstructed by the sea
with the long labor of its tides.
But sometimes, it's not so simple. To glue a jug back together is one thing. It's the ultimate expression of the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, to honor and elevate the beauty of imperfection and impermanence. But how do we stitch back together the brokenness of borders that break apart lovers, or systems that separate families, laws that lend themselves to longing, wars that wear down the heart's capacity to feel compassion?
Living in these times has tested our ability to hold space for other's suffering, allow for the stories that contradict our own, grant grace to actions that feel safe to some and a threat to others. I hear it in my friends' voices—the weariness, the impatience, the exasperation of these days—how do we hang on amidst so much brokenness?
I could wax poetic about the Jewish mystical notion of tikkun olam, repairing the world, which frames brokenness as an essential part of the human creation story.
According to 16th century mystics, God created the world with vessels that contained divine light. These vessels shattered, scattering these sparks of light into the material world. Each of us has the mystical and moral task of performing good deeds as a way to gather these sparks of light, repairing the fractured universe and moving toward harmony and wholeness.
It's a powerful idea—one with an organizing force behind it—to act with loving kindness in the direction of justice.
But how do we make sense of the current inertia of this calling, to restore and repair an inherently broken world?
In Upside-Down Love, a memoir told in two voices by Israeli lawyer Sari Bashi and her Palestinian partner, Omar, I read about the brokenness of Israel and Palestine, the barriers to movement among Palestinians, the impossibility of comprehension on either side to imagine the pain of the other, the extreme sense of threat on all sides, the sense of this threat as infinite and eternal, baked into the stories that steer us in one direction or the other.
The book details the way Sari and Omar attempt a love affair and marriage in this climate, against all the odds, and describes how the brokenness is so baked into their existence, the idea of its opposite doesn't even exist anymore.
"For Palestinians, it's impossible not to break the law, because everything is illegal," Bashi writes.
"And because everything is illegal, most of the laws are not enforced, because you can't really outlaw living. So every Palestinian, by virtue of being Palestinian, lives in a state of perpetual criminality."
She lives in Tel Aviv, her partner lives in Ramallah, a place forbidden to all Israelis. But Omar, as a Gazan, can't live in Tel Aviv, so Sari decides to take the risk to live with Omar in Ramallah.
"I can't observe the commas of the military order that forbids Israeli citizens from entering the city of Ramallah because they have placed my love outside the bounds of the law, and that's a law I have chosen to break."
Since October 7, I have remained silent in public spaces about my feelings toward Israel, the genocidal war in Gaza, the heartache of Jewish connection to such a contested land. There's nothing useful I can say online that would repair or restore anything.
But reading has been a balm for me, reading stories about Palestinian lives and Israeli lives alike, and trying to allow my heart to feel into the corners, creases, and cracks that social media can't see and won't touch and doesn't reflect—the in-between spaces where life keeps unfolding—between people, families, communities.
That's where the golden threads course through the broken parts. I'm not saying this with much elegance or grace, but that's what I feel at this moment, that repair and healing happen in these very subtle, silence places without words or language.
Sometimes the breakage is so big, a claim feels like a joke. It's never about the money, is it? It's about saying I'm sorry for the state of its brokenness, and doing what one can to make the situation a little better, a little more manageable, a little less devastating, less disappointing.
I wish that jug hadn't broken in the mail. It was a beauty, someone made it with painstaking attention and care. It's broken now, and the refund has been sent. The woman in Madison thanked me. We both went on with our lives.
But once-whole jug is still broken. Perhaps she'll glue it back together again, or not. But I like to believe that the way the two of us handled the broken thing with care says something about what's possible yet between humans in this very broken world.
