Let's put all our treasures together - the clock, plates, cups carved in gold into a sack and carry them to the sea. There let our possessions smash in the sinister shock of a breaker; let the things that are broken call out like a river and the sea render back to us whole in the might of its crosscurrents all that we held of no worth. The junk no hand has broken, but still goes on breaking.
-from Oda a las Cosas Rotas by Pablo Neruda
Poet, Pablo Neruda makes peace with all things broken. He portrays brokenness as a state as natural as wholeness.
When things get broken, it's no one's fault. Items fall apart and wear out. People go away, change, break down and die.
In personal narratives, we weave fragments back together.
Find stories that breathe in the crack in the vase. Tromp through your mind's landscape for broken things. Combine animate and inanimate objects and ideas.
Notice tools individuals use to fix the broken. Some possessions get fixed, others are replaced or abandoned.
Discover a new perspective about breakage.
What should become fixed or salvaged?
Break wide open.
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