A Story About Broken Glass
What is life teaching you to see?
I’ve been enjoying an existential amusement for the past few months and this question is at the heart of it. Put another way: What does the macro world reveal to you about the micro moments bubbling up in yours?
I have a working theory that if you are ready to see, you will soon find the answer right in front of you, reflected somewhere in your surroundings.
It is a fascinating game to play:
What is the metaphor present in my context that will reveal a new perspective on my current situation?
It’s quite easy to grok if you are willing to accept that all your answers might exist right in front of you in a mythical, mythopoetic form.
Take, for instance, a peculiar instance of broken glass.
Now, it’s important for you to know that I have a strange phobia about broken glass. I have a fear that I’ll step on it; that in some way, shape, or form a fine sliver will work its way under my skin. I don’t know where this weird aversion originated, but needless to say broken glass is something I try and stay far away from.
How ironic that what we resist inevitably finds us.
Two months ago I moved into a new home. This decision was caused by a series of events that unfolded quite drastically and dramatically over the course of April. I was not intending to move when all this happened, and found myself angry and heartbroken at having to leave a home I loved because of circumstances outside my control that became debilitating.
In a moment when so much of what I was working towards was coming together, my literal foundation was being shattered.
I made a choice to not let that break me.
Alas, I took a shaky leap — and the universe met me immediately. A new place found me within 24 hours and I was able to move within two weeks.
My new home was exactly what I needed to rebuild from the ground up. How perfect that life was giving me what I needed, even though it definitely did not feel easy.
If you’ve never lived in a rural area in the deep woods, let me preface what happens next by sharing an observation. There’s an interesting tendency amongst the mountain folk to hoard scrap materials just in case they come in handy. My own backyard is an informal construction zone at the moment, as my landlord had literally just finished remodeling my new space when I suddenly needed it.
But outside of my situation, there’s a level of disorganized chaos that’s generally acceptable here — if not a community standard.
In any case, it’s a few days before my official move-in and I drop by to do a last walk-through. To get to my front door, I take a dirt footpath that runs from the gravel driveway through a small redwood grove to my front entrance. It’s then that I notice something unusual: a good amount of broken glass scattered right on the path.
You know me. I can’t be having that.
What I thought was a quickie clean up job soon turns into several days of excavating enormous shards from the ground, so much that I fill a brown paper bag with all the pieces. I don’t know where all the glass came from, but every time I thought I was finished I would walk outside the next day and find…more.
By the end of the week I had collected an honestly astonishing amount of glass. It was one of the most painstaking cleaning missions of recent memory; a job that I didn’t expect to relish so much as I raked the path by hand.
As I diligently removed the debris, I found myself simultaneously releasing a lot of buried anger and grief.
Sharp emotions that had been cutting into me ever so silently.
I might have chalked this up to just another day of living in a wild mountain abode, until the last day of my dirty work, when a small cowrie shell popped up from where it had been buried underneath all the glass in the path.
Now, the cowrie shell is not native to California. It’s a small mollusk found most commonly on the Indian sub-continent and along the coast of Africa.
The significance of this exact shell might have escaped someone’s else attention. But over the month of April I was formerly initiated as a diviner, and in the Dagara tradition, the West African lineage I work within, the cowrie shell specifically has great meaning and presence.
The meta joke here gets even better.
This lineage of divination is an ancient (50,000+ years old!) earth-based elemental cosmology that uses archetypal talismans to channel medicine stories and rituals that heal people. It’s like learning to read between the lines of the greatest book ever written, only far more interesting than anything humans have farted out.
It has shown me that life is a form of divination.
Your only task in regards to thriving is to become an astute translator of the messages you’re receiving. Because as it turns out: they are all around you, winking.
The tiny, mighty cowrie is considered to be the physical incarnation of great beings speaking; a literal conduit of healing messages from the other side.
Who knows how this cowrie originally got here, but it had been buried there for a long time. Almost as though waiting for this moment to deliver its sacred reminder. It was the size of a tooth and yet so weighted with meaning. By the time I was complete with my cleaning, I would unearth three in total. In numerology, three is the number of transformation, the holy trinity: our connection to the everything.
How divine that they would find me.
How divine that they would remind me.
There is always medicine waiting in the most broken places.
And when you do the dirty work to clean your life, healing arrives.
🔺
Katharine Hargreaves is a spiritual mentor, transformational facilitator, ceremonial guide, and initiated medicine womxn. Her first book, The Art of the Experiment, is a transformational manual for people who want to change their life but don’t know where to start. For more information on Katharine and how to work with her, visit her website.
