by Charles “Tom” Brown
Copyright 2007
We are both wonderful and difficult at the same time. We are flawed and stuck in old patterns, but it is by and through our humanness that we grow and change and transform. For without the places cracked and softened by experience and time, we remain too hard and fixed to be affected by life.
The first step in freeing ourselves from this burden is to acknowledge the hardening of the heart. Then, without judgment or rejection, we will uncover the great tenderness that resides at the very core of our humanness. Our beauty and our flawed self both arise from the same tenderness. If we can shine warmth and openness into the dark places where we don’t know we’re lovable, this starts to forge a marriage between our beauty and our wounded self.
This is, after all, the love we most long for – this embracing of our humanness, which lets us appreciate ourselves as the luminous beings we are, housed in a vulnerable, flickering form whose endless calling is to move from chrysalis to butterfly, from seed to new birth.
Being wholly and genuinely human means celebrating that we are both vulnerable and indestructible at the same time. I have been broken and failed so many times that my identity has sprouted and peeled like an onion. But because of this, I have lived more than my share of lives and feel both young and old at once. Though I still wonder if I will break, I somehow know it’s all a part of the rhythm of being alive.
Now I understand that as we listen beyond our small sense of things, we begin to see that perhaps it is our humanness that helps us find each other. Perhaps it is precisely because we are not perfect that we complete each other. We see that a magnificent light surrounds us, and no matter how we turn or are turned, the magnificence follows.
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