Pain and Pearls

This has been an incredible year for me.  As I was admiring how much I love my life, I was also thinking about how numb I had been for the past 21 years.  Since 5 weeks earlier I had been voraciously un-numbing, and I was realizing a lot.  And I was creating a lot, too.  My art had come back to life.

“It makes me think of a pearl,” I told Katie “You know how pearls are formed…the oyster feels an irritant, and in a effort to ease its discomfort, it excretes the nacre to coat the grit and make the irritation less abrasive on the oyster’s muscle.  If the oyster couldn’t feel the pain, it wouldn’t make a pearl.”

And that is what we can provide our children, if we are present enough to resist healing them: the space and unwavering regard to make their own pearls.

And now that I am feeling things again, my pearls are coming forth too!