
Yesterday I wrote about ‘the cracked vase lasts.’ I was still thinking about what that meant, and why I had not finished the post back in fall of 2018 when I went to sleep last night. It was the same reason I did not post more than twice in the fall of 2018: the vase had begun to crack in fall of 2017. January 1, 2020, I made a new post, about writing the stories, the relationships, the music of the new year, and never gave the cracked vase another thought until yesterday.
A cracked vase can symbolize many things (if you do not think so, look up the early poets and painters–those guys (and they were guys) had some vivid imaginations. The thing about a cracked vase is depending on how one intends to use it, it can actually survive a very long time with a useful purpose. My cracked vase–the real one holding the metal flowers made from scrap metal in South Africa–has lasted since 1970, albeit, the crack is only about 17 years old. I keep it because it is a memory connected with my grandmother.
Gates asserted that “injuries are part of the interconnected web of our mind, body, spirit, and relationships (2002, p. 61) and a necessary reminder about “not paying attention to the movement required to bring [our] body forward and up with grace.” He added that we do not deserve the injuries, but they give us an opportunity to pay attention (p. 62).

I began to read the meditation where I had stopped October 26, 2018–about the time the vase (my vessel, not my real vase) began to crack. I scribbled notes in the margin about acting as if I trusted the divine in the universe, and then realized I had not gotten even 100 days into the meditations from when I began January 20, 2018. I wrote, “What shall I do with the next 100?”
This morning, I read Day 100. Gates was describing his first experience in a hot springs, and how if you sit still, you can withstand the heat, but begin moving and it was uncomfortable. He likened it to our lives when we begin to move: something happens.

I committed to do the meditations for the next 100 days and see where I was at the end of then. Rather like a benchmark for the first 100 days of a new administration: ascertaining the energy, the organizing, and the direction: To what do we “regularly and consistently bring our attention?”

Will the light break through from the darkness? It always has before.