Shattered

I haven’t blogged about my art for a while. I have completed at least one piece, and four others are in progress (though one is a “commissioned” piece so it’s at the forefront right now). So yes, more blogs will come… but for today, I’m going to finally blog about a piece I created nearly a year ago. It’s been a difficult piece to talk about, though I think the imagery tends to say what it needs to without my musings. It was created at the start of my divorce proceedings. I’m still not going to go into that or anything regarding what led up to that because that’s still too deep a pain to convey in words, but simply talk about the piece itself and what it conveys.

In some ways, I think it needs no explanation. I think it speaks to people quite readily who have felt deep, shattering pain in their lives. We suffer loss in a multitude of ways. We lose loved ones through death, divorce, accidents, illnesses and just broken relationships. Loss of a job, a meaningful career, facing an illness or changed way of life… no matter what the cause, you know what it’s like to feel as though everything around you is falling apart and shattering. Shattered lives. Shattered love. Shattered trust. Shattered dreams. Even your very being – shattered.

Broken lives are a part of the human experience, sadly enough, so I know this piece speaks into all those moments of brokenness. Where we feel as though a sledge hammer has slammed into the fragile case we keep around our lives and our hearts, shattering everything to its very core. What we thought of as authentic and true now becomes cracked and skewed; everything has an edge, and everything is seen through reflecting shards that twist and distort what we once thought was tangible and genuine. There is nothing more devastating and shattering than having your entire reality, everything you thought to be normal about life or about a person falling apart in a shower of tinkling glass. Your hopes and dreams for a particular future – shattered.

It does amaze me how fragile the lives we live tend to be at times, and how quickly everything can change and fall apart around us. Even our faith is changed in some way when such life-altering events occur. Not that one necessarily loses it – I would have been lost without my faith and the faith community I was surrounded by over the past year – but my faith has changed. My relationship and understanding of God has changed as a result of such events. Whether that’s good or bad I think is not the right way to look at it – but simply that it is. Our faith changes throughout life, our outlooks change based on events we go through. A broken and shattered cross is endemic of what the cross itself stands for – a broken and shattered humanity that strung God up on a cross when he dared get too close to us.

Trust between humanity and God has long been shattered. Trust between individuals also has shattered. Some events even cause us to finally, and at last, have cause to question trust in ourselves, shattering our illusions that we always know what’s best for us or thinking we somehow have some type of control in this world and of those around us. All of that is shattered.

“Shattered” is the world we live in.