Not Afraid of Broken Things

I have to apologize to you, my sweet community, for going so quiet and perhaps dark for a few months now. As my closest friends know, this year has been a difficult one for me. I have lost some things that are precious to me and I am surrendering to a grief process in this season. This is my yoga---to allow myself to feel and heal. My victory is my surrender. Right now my focus is on my family and friends in my inner circle. I lost one of my best friends to cancer in October. My Dad, also, now living with us, has his own battle that we fight with him against cancer.

So if you are paying attention, you may have noticed the schedule becoming rather thin on classes. We are focusing right now on teacher trainings (more to come on those), and on trauma informed yoga trainings with a few ongoing classes and series sprinkled here and there. Just wanted you to know, we are still here, not going anywhere, and will be offering to the community what we can and curating special experiences for you to also continue in your own journey of growth and transformation. We are just being a bit more selective in our offerings right now so I can quite frankly conserve my energy for my own family's needs in this difficult season. I want to leave you with a beautiful reflection that speaks to the season of breaking that we and perhaps some of you may be feeling. There is always hope. There is always light. To these things I cling.

The Farmer comes in from the barn, leaves a bucket from the henhouse at the back door with his boots. I can hear him washing up at the mudroom’s porcelain sink. He steps into the kitchen. I look up from the dishes. He’s seen it already. The man can read my eyes better than he reads the skies. Sometimes all our unspoken broken speaks louder than anything we could ever say. He reads my slow breaking over the kid’s lightning-bolt news and all my not--enoughness that I can’t even grope through the pain to find words for.

He pulls me into himself, enfolds me. And then, into the quiet, he says it so soft I almost miss it, what I have held on to more than a thousand times since.

“You know—everything all across this farm says the same thing, you know that, right?” He waits till I let him look me in the eye, let him look into me and all this fracturing. “The seed breaks to give us the wheat. The soil breaks to give us the crop, the sky breaks to give us the rain, the wheat breaks to give us the bread. And the bread breaks to give us the feast. There was once even an alabaster jar that broke to give Him all the glory.”

He looks right through the cracks of me. He smells of the barn and the dirt and the sky, and he’s carrying something of the maple trees at the edge of the woods—carrying old light. He says it slowly, like he means it: “Never be afraid of being a broken thing.” Ann Voskamp (One Thousand Gifts)