Run

Along the beach. Through the jungle. Onto the next beach. And back again. I run. Each day the same. And each day never the same.

I run at the mercy of the ocean. And the moon. Humbled in my knowledge that it is they who determine my run. Vast sea. Glorious moon. Tiny inconsequential me.

Each day, as I approach the beach, I wonder what my run will hold for me. My feet reach the shoreline and the sand tells me of the nocturnal dance of sea and moon.  Some days the sand is kind. Sea-packed with a receding tide. A hard steady surface. My strides are long and easy. Thoughts are free to roam. To sort.

Other days the sand is soft. Water-soaked. And I slow down, knowing it will take more energy to get through this one. I take deliberate, short, wide steps. I become attuned to the variations in the terrain. I stay in my body. Forgive myself my weakness.

Life is this way. Some days are saturated and hard to navigate. Other days we glide along with grace and ease. The tide is my daily reminder to hand myself over to the flow. That doesn’t mean I always remember.

I am reminded of this again on another leg of my run. On the longest, steepest hill in the jungle. I run it downhill on my way there, and uphill on my way back.

On my way down, I am light. Full of energy and grace. A bird. Alone and at peace.

But on the way up, after a long stretch of beach, I am often tired. Clumsy. Slow. I prepare myself for it. Check in. Mark my breathing. Grant myself permission to slow down.

Sometimes I pass other runners on that hill. They coming down. I going up. They look strong. I feel weak. And I remind myself that life is that way, too. That sometimes I am the one running down the hill, gently urged on by gravity. And other times I am the one running up it. Some days I am seen in my weakness. Other days I appear strong. I bear witness to the vulnerability of others. Each time one moment. One set of circumstances. No more. No less.

It used to be that I was acutely aware of the wildlife along the trail of my exotic jungle run. Every snap of a branch a jaguar. Each cracking leaf an iguana.  The palm leaf lodged in the tree branches high above my head a creature waiting to pounce.

Last week my fears were much less exotic. Last week I was thinking of the man who was robbing hikers on that trail. Each broken twig a footstep. Each bird cry a warning. I prepared myself with every step for a possible encounter. Willing myself to look directly into the eyes of desperation. To feel compassion instead of anger.

I imagined a man on a long walk on sea-soaked sand. Too long on the uphill portion of his life. I envisioned help for him. The door of a metal cage opening. A spirit released.

Today I was grateful to have my run back. The man arrested, no longer a concern. The sand was solid. The tide low. I forced my mind back to the sacred. Stopped to collect washed-up shoes at the end of the beach. Urged on by my desire to see the beauty in tragedy, I ran back through the jungle. Four shoes in each hand I envisioned the art I would create with them. Grateful for another day of hard-packed sand.

Plastic Mexico

Day two in plastic Mexico. We are at a resort in Puerto Vallarta. The kind of place where vacationers who do not like to travel go. It is perfectly sanitized – scrubbed clean of any sign of Mexico. Food void of flavor. Music void of art. Entertainment void of culture.   Pure bliss. Today.

But yesterday, I was still an artist and traveler. Not yet willing to let go of my need for creativity and inspiration. Yesterday, I lied in a lounge chair and consoled myself with the beautiful turquoise color the pigeons’ underbellies turned every time they flew over the pool. I willed myself to ignore the fact that their flight took them past the swim-up bar. I tried to shut out the bad seventies music blaring over the pool. When the waiter came by to offer me a drink before noon (in English), I laughed and responded, “No, gracias.”

Yesterday, I sent covert derisive glances in the direction of the people all around me. I whispered to myself that they didn’t get it. That they were really missing out. But, even yesterday, I knew that my derision was nothing more than a thinly-veiled mask of envy. I knew that I secretly wished I could be more like them. Or what I sometimes imagine them to be. If only for a day.

I know that I generally wither in places like this. It has always been the normal places where I feel most other. I also know that usually, I am okay with being other. At my best, I know we are all other. But today, I don’t want to be other. Today, I just want to be.  Today, I mostly just want to escape being me. Her. For just a little while.

I am tired of being her. Exhausted, really. I am tired of living in her sensitive body. Tired of her ears that hear everything.  Tired of her synesthetic brain that processes sound as feeling.  Tired of she who sees multiple things in every one thing.  I need a break from her.  She’s exhausting.

And by day two, I have succeeded. I have dedicated twenty-four hours to doing nearly nothing. I have kept my thoughts at the level of the kiddie pool. Started jiggling my foot to Rod Stewart.  I am noticing nothing.  Feeling nothing. I am drinking a mango margarita in the A.M.  And, I have forgotten all about the pigeons.

I needed this.  We all did.  An experience that bears no resemblance to the life we have been living in Sayulita. No house under construction. No metal reverberating against concrete. No hammers. No saws. No drills.

We needed a place where our brains could rest.  Where our nervous systems could recooperate.  A weekend of neural convalescence.

Maybe that is why everyone comes here.  Maybe the perfect line of palapas on a perfectly manicured beach in a perfectly sunny climate with perfectly banal music and perfectly tasteless food is just what all humans need in their randomly noisy lives.  Maybe we have all been driven here by the same thing.   Maybe mine was construction noise and theirs was the noise of 24-hour news and weather.  Maybe I am not other after all.

But, I don’t have this thought on day two.  On day two, I am having no thought at all.  And that’s a good thing.

But by day three, I am ready to go home. I take my morning run on the beach.  Music in my ears set to the sound of crashing waves.  My breathing deepens as my feet sink into the sand.  I feel the joy return as I step over the beach debris.  I allow myself to stop and collect shards of sea glass.

I run as far as Viejo Vallarta.  Past all kinds of imperfection.  I stop to stare in awe at the frigate birds perched on a beautiful poop-covered statue of a woman releasing a dove by the ocean.  And as I stand looking, I feel the another presence enter me.  I become aware of the fact that I am appreciating the beauty of bird poop streaming down oxidized metal. It is then that I know she is back.  She who sees it all.  She who feels it all. And I am happy to be with her.  It is then that I realize that I am ready go home again.

It will feel really good to be home again.

Imaginary Lines

I still remember it.  I am a young child.  Five maybe.  The room is dark.  I am sitting on a stool in my basement, looking at an enormous image projected on the wall.  It is a slide of a little girl with brown hair and brown skin.  She is my age, maybe a bit older.  She is my older sister.  But, I will never meet her.  She lives in the Philippines.  Far away.  She is Keridad, the little girl my mother fostered during the two years she lived in Baguio in the Peace Corps.

When my father went off to work, he flew.  He was a commercial pilot.  And when we wanted to know where he was, my mother gathered us around a globe.  Her perfectly polished fingernail pointed to small letters on a bumpy colored surface surrounded by other textured surfaces.  She would roll the globe and say, “This is the United States.  We are here.”  Another rotation and then, “This is Spain.  Daddy is there.  Daddy and I got married in Spain.”

I remember standing up in class.  Placing my hand over my heart and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. I liked it.  The sound of the words.  Finding my heart.  Feeling for the beat.  Sitting back down.  I liked the repetition, the tradition.  It was like a dance.  But, I don’t remember when I really understood that we were doing that dance to learn patriotism.  I never understood that we were drawing imaginary lines around ourselves.  Defining ourselves as Americans.  When that information made its way into my consciousness, it was very hard for me to understand.  It still is.

It wasn’t until I moved to Paris my junior year in college that I really understood what it meant to be American.  That is, when I began to grasp that there was such a thing as being an American, and that I was somehow defined as such.  I didn’t like it.  It felt like people were forcing me into an ill-designed and highly restrictive costume.

Since then, I have lived in Japan, Russia, and now Mexico.  I have travelled throughout Europe and Asia.  I taught English as a Second Language to adults from every corner of the world for many years in New York and Denver.  With every one of those experiences, my understanding of my nationality has diminished, and that of our humanity expanded.  In my mind’s eye, I see invisible lines that connect us all.  Multi-dimensional webs that weave use all together.  I still can’t quite grasp the invisible ones that divide people.  Nation means little to me.

Still, there have been so many times in the past when I have travelled, that I felt I had to apologize for being American.  So often, I carried a chip around on my shoulder, ready to explain that to be an American is not to be one’s president.  That we are individuals and that one should not confuse the leader of a country or the politics of a country with the identity of the individuals in that country.

Living in Mexico, I find myself having that same imaginary conversation at every turn.  Sometimes I feel I should be apologizing to every person I meet – each one with a terrible story of their own experience in the States, or that of someone they know and love.  When our immigration laws discriminate so directly against the people in this country, it is a wonder I am treated with such generosity.

Most of the time I live in ignorant bliss of all that is occurring in the States.  I simply don’t want to know.  But, the other day, after so many nudges from my friends on Facebook, I finally watched Obama’s Memorial Speech for the victims of the shootings in Tucson.  And for the first time, while living abroad, I feel relieved – unburdened by my American identity.

It is such a luxury to live abroad when tragedy strikes the United States.  Without the over-stimulating desensitizing media bombardment that is news there, I can take things in gradually.  First, I hear the words.  “A senator was shot in Arizona.”  Then, I cover my ears for a bit.  Let the sadness of that simple piece of loss settle in.  I am able to choose if I want to know more.  A choice I don’t feel I have in the States, where it is nearly impossible to shield the sensitive self from sad stories.

And I don’t know quite how to describe what a gift it was to receive the details of that terrible tragedy through the words of President Barack Obama.  The filter of peace, understanding and unity through which he described the tragedy moved me to tears repeatedly and then lifted me up again through his inspirational words that spoke of our humanity.

I can’t say I am proud to be an American in Mexico, where I have heard countless stories of people who have returned here because they were forced to leave the United States.  People who were separated from family members by the dehumanizing immigration laws in the United States.  I continue to apologize for those policies.  I do my best to show my compassion and to separate myself from those policies.  But, at least, for once, I don’t feel I have to apologize for the attitude of my president.  For once, I am able to quote him, instead of ducking my head in shame at the mention of his name.  Because although Obama was speaking as an American to a highly-polarized nation of Americans when he said,

“Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations.  To listen to each other more carefully.  To sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.  In the fleeting time we have on this earth, what matters is not wealth or status or power or fame, but rather how well we have loved and what small part we have played in making the lives of other people better.  We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another, that’s entirely up to us,”

he was also speaking as the son of an African man and as a man who spent his childhood in Indonesia.  This is a man who understands that imaginary lines drawn between nations are just that – imaginary.  And that is a person I am proud to be associated with.

Magic

Artistic creativity is magical, but it’s not magic.  – Charles Limb

Oh, how I hope Charles Limb is right.  Or maybe I hope he’s wrong.  I can’t decide.

I have been walking around in search of myself for many days now.  Countless days.  I have lost count of how many days.

My children have had a very long break from school.  I have spent too many days in Mom mode.  Speaking several languages at once. Choosing some words for the fluency level of a five-year old, and others for a nine-year old adult trapped in a child’s body.

I have been in many bodies at once.  Always aware of my children’s bodies, their proximity to mine, and the air surrounding them, even when I can’t see them.  My five year old rides in circles on our patio.  He falls into the garden and I tap into the energy waves flowing toward me to know if he is hurt.  My nine year old rides his bike around town, and the molecules in the air shift when I sense he might be in danger.

These maternal perceptual faculties never cease to amaze me.  They ARE magical.  But they are also creativity snuffers.  They force me into tiny crammed dots on a timeline where I am unnaturally aware of time and space. Of nutritional intake, hours slept, hands on the clock.  Temporality has always stumped me.

I have been going through the motions of making art along the way, every now and then, but the actions lack feeling.

My son lost the pin in my capo, so I can’t sing along with my guitar.  I miss my voice.

I have visions of things I’d like to say, but the words won’t come.  Not in the way I want them to.

I have spent some days in my studio on the beach constructing my ocean-tumbled-trash tiles. They are evolving.  Still, I don’t feel the creative rush I get from some of my other work.  I feel a gentle breeze instead of a sudden gust of wind that turns my umbrella inside out.

And there is a specific kind of loneliness that accompanies a lack of creativity.  It is a sort of disembodied loneliness.  Not the good floating somewhere above myself in the upper right arc of my peripheral vision kind.  It’s the kind where disembodiment feels simply like I lack a self, but I have to keep hanging around with me, nonetheless.

I don’t know how to call creativity back.  I can’t light candles or howl it into being.  I just have to wait.  Wait for the flow to come back through me.

As my boys and I were heading out the door for their first day back at school today, a man stopped and stared at us.  Or through us, really.  I said “Hola” to him and he ignored me.  He just stared at me and through me and at my home and through it.  His lack of commitment to his intrusion on our family irked me.  I finally asked, “Necesita algo?” This shook him awake and away he went.

Then, as I was riding my bike home from the boys’ school, a woman at the end of the street did the same thing.  She stared at me.  I looked back and she seemed not to notice.  Just kept staring at and through me.  Finally I just looked away.  Inexplicably annoyed.  Feeling insulted again.  Looked at but not seen.

Then, here again in a coffee shop.  A man walked in and looked at me.  His gaze lingered as if he was trying to make sense of me.  And now I am beginning to wonder. Is it that I am so lost at the moment that I appear blurry?  I feel out of focus.  Could it be that I AM out of focus?  That these eyes are lingering on me unconsciously waiting for me to come into focus, and when I don’t, they finally look away?

Or is it perhaps, that I am appearing to them as an apparition?  Something ethereal and soft around the edges.  Maybe they sense my arrival, see me approaching and stand waiting.

Or maybe it’s just that I am wearing my husband’s hat and they can’t figure out whether I am a man or a woman.

Either way, I imagine I will show up again soon.  And when I do, we can all stop staring off into the distance…looking.

Connection and Grace

I have found a new studio.   It is on the beach.  I pack up my materials in a box, stack the box behind me on my ATV, and drive down there on the path from my house.  I set up a blanket in the sand, in the shade of a massive palm tree. Two resident pale-billed woodpeckers squeak and peck at the tree behind me. Tourists stretch out on beach towels in front of me.

Yesterday, a young girl named Rosi lingered next to me.  She wears a colorful scarf on her head that matches the huge bundles of brightly colored bags she carries on her arms.  She walks up and down the beach selling them all day long. They are beautiful.  She is beautiful.  She lives with her aunt, sister, and two cousins in Bucerias.  She is sixteen.  The rest of her family is in Chiapas, a two-day drive from here.  She will return to her family after the high season. She tells me she wants to learn English.  We start on numbers.  I promise her that I will bring a notebook next time.  I know I will start looking forward to her visits.  I suspect she will be disappointed that I am not there today.

Most of the time I sit in the sand, completely immersed in what I am doing.  When I feel the sun beating down on my shoulders, I drag my blanket back into the shade.  The hawkers stop to ask me what I am doing.  Their collections of sunglasses, jewelry and blankets rest on a board at their feet.  “How many?  Very cheap.  Good price for you.”  They don’t say any of that to me.  They just stop and look.  Stay awhile and chat.  They want to know my name.  Where I am from.  I ask them the same.  They ask me what I am making.  I tell them it is arte loco.  Plasticos. Todo es de la playa. I’ve been practicing those lines.  I don’t know what else to say.  They nod, and tell me it is bonita.

The tourists just walk right by me like they don’t see me.  Which is good, because I don’t want them to ask me about my work.  I don’t quite know how to form the answer, yet.  In English or in Spanish.  I am using found beach trash (castaways), red clay tiles, and sand.  I create unlikely compositions of washed up plastics, children’s toys, bones, and metal.   It is a relief to be working again.  My restless creative spirit feels satiated.  For now.

Still, I hadn’t anticipated the social aspect of working in public.  I am used to creative solitude.  Hours lost in my own thoughts.  A direct uninterrupted line between my self and inspiration.  And the work doesn’t feel resolved.  I am still in the process stage.  I feel timid.  Self-conscious.   Like it’s not the art I should speak to, but the process itself.

I want to speak to the subtle ways my experience of the beach has changed.  The way the trash washed up on shore has become beautiful to me.  How each little piece of refuse feels like a small gift.  I’d like to talk about how my hands have come to know sand in a different way, now that I run it through my fingers and sprinkle it onto my pieces.  How the kind women in the hardware store helped me figure out what type of glue would adhere best to clay.  How they mixed it up and gave it to me in a small milk jug.

I’d like to talk about how the ugliness of plastics has become beautiful to me.  How doing this work has planted me here.  How my feet have developed new muscle memory when I walk in search of materials.

I want to talk about how every little piece of mangled plastic I pick up feels like a gift.  How humbled I feel by what the ocean does with the trash that makes its way into her body.  How uplifted I feel by the beauty that is formed from such ugliness.  How inspired I feel by this connection between nature and humanity.  How inconsequential I feel when I think of the impossible chance encounters I have with things that were once a part of the life of some other human I will never know.

The work is about process.  The process of creation.  Of experience, forever altered by changes in environment.  The work is about beauty borne of neglect.  More than anything, the work is about connection and grace.  Always, connection and grace.  The rest will reveal itself to me in time.

Associative Pairings

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination.  – John Keats

Sitting by my pool, alone in my yard, I am thinking about how lucky I am to be here.  I think, “I am lucky.”  Problem is, I don’t feel lucky.  The thought comes to my mind, but the rest won’t compute.  The feeling part.  There’s just too much other stuff in the way.  Too much longing.  Too much missing.  “This is Mexico,” I tell myself.  “This is your life.  You are living the dream.  Feel it.  For God’s sake, would you please feel it?”

Yet, I can’t shake this feeling in my body.  Anxiety.  Constant unease attached to nothing in particular.  No moment.  No specific something to account for all this anxiety.

Then.  A butterfly passes by on the outskirts of my peripheral vision.  I don’t flinch.  Not that I should, it is a butterfly.  But it seems everything makes me jump these days.  Not so with the butterfly.  Instead, out of nowhere, I am happy. I feel happy.

I begin to wonder what kind of information is woven into the neural fabric of my brain that makes me jump at the sight of a spider, but keeps me from reacting to a butterfly even before it has come into my consciousness.  Shape.  Color.  Size.  Rhythm.  Energy.  Flutter.  Magic.

Then, I wonder how long it will take for my brain to store enough information about spiders before they stop scaring the bejeezus out of me.  I’m feeling impatient with my brain.  I wish it would work faster.  Acclimate me to this place.  Stop being so sensitive – constantly sending me biofeedback.

Then I hear a bird in a tree across the road.  I don’t recognize its call, but still, I know it is a bird.  I feel the lift in my heart before I realize I hear a bird. The lift is birdsong joy.  The joy of childhood.  Love.  Longing.

I listen more intently.  In my mind’s eye, I see a bird squeezing a dog toy.  I don’t know any birds in Denver with dog toys.  Still, the sound of its call conjures the same feeling in me that the Northern Flicker does when I hear it from my house in Denver.  It transports me to the treetops.  Outside of my head and into my heart.  The place where joy resides.

I get up from my lawn-chair by the pool.  I walk out into the street to find the bird.   The bird sits in my neighbor’s tree, at the same height in the branches that the Northern Flicker calls from in our Butternut tree in Denver.

The bird is an Oriole.   Wings yellow, belly black.  I have spotted an Oriole in the tree.  I know they are abundant here.  I have admired their elegant nests hanging from trees in the jungle for years.  Still, this is my first time spotting one so close to home.

I return to my seat by the pool.  “The Oriole is my Northern Flicker,” I tell myself.  I feel suddenly, utterly calm.  The inexplicable anxiety I have been living with in this county is lifted for a moment.  I am at ease.  I am home.

I look around.  Listen.  Immerse myself in the sensory moment.  And I tell myself.

This chair beside the pool is your comfortable couch.

My body relaxes a bit.

I smell the palm fronds burning next door.   Those smells are the sound of your neighbor’s lawn mower. I relax even more.

This might work, I tell myself.  I have always been impaired by my brain’s compulsion for associate pairings (Piaget’s term).  Two similar things, hopelessly entwined in my mind to the point where I can’t remember which is which.  Pots and pans.  Lids and caps.  Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino.  Why not put that to good use?  My brain might just fall for this.

So, I continue.  I delve deeper into my sensory landscape.  Look.  Listen.  Conjure up my present life to find more.  I think,

Geckos are squirrels.

The palm trees are your apple trees.

The roof of the house is your backyard studio.

The pool is the kids’ fort.

The ATV is your minivan. (Didn’t really fall for that one, but, I continue.)

Surfboards are skis.

Bonfires are campfires.

A walk in the jungle is a hike in the woods.

A fear of snakes is that of bears.

Vines to trim are leaves to rake.

Morning breeze is morning freeze.

Bouganvallia blooms are aspens in the autumn.

A walk in search of beach glass is a walk to collect fallen leaves.

The Panadero song is the Good Humor song.

The black birds opening and closing a squeaky gate at the top of the palms are the twittering of sparrows in the bushes.

My mind journeys on and on.  Back and forth between there and here.  Weaving images, sounds, feelings, smells together to make a place for all things combined.  Peace in the contrast.  Links in my brain.

It works. Like magic.  My brain has fallen for it.  Bent.  Molded.  Halted its anxious neuro-transmittance of alarming information to my nervous system.

I feel at ease.  Home.  I feel happy.

And then I have a fleeting thought.  What about all the longing I have for the friends and family I no longer see?   Will it work for them?  I think of all the times new friends have told me I remind them of other friends – good friends.  It’s always a really good sign.

But, me, I have never been capable of that. Too often separated from my loved ones, I have developed an affinity for taking them with me.  My brain doesn’t know the difference.  But my heart, it knows.

Love.  The feeling of a hug from a good friend.

Joy.  Community built from years of watching our children grow.

Ease.  Conspiratory giggles over glasses of wine.

Comfort.  Belly busting laughter.

Connection.  Loneliness lifted through deep intimate conversations.

Presence.  The feeling of being known, seen.

My brain, brittle and plastic.  It requires work to make space for the new.  But my heart, ever-expansive, knows no bounds.  It is filled to the brim.  Still, there’s always plenty of room there for more.

Plastic Shards of Our Humanity

There is no way to track the life of a single shoe.  Especially, not one that has been washed on to the shore of a rocky beach.   A scientist might put a metal collar on a Canada goose and track its flight pattern, or a web cam on an elephant to follow its journey through the tundra.   But a shoe, washed out of a person’s life and into the ocean – that we do not track.

As I walk along the beach, after a few days of towering waves and high tide, I find shoe upon shoe strewn amongst the beach detritus.   Each one, a single shoe separated from its owner and no longer a part of a pair.  One shoe with a myriad of information about the life of its owner.  Lives contained in lost shoes.   Artifacts of lives lived, washed up on shore.

I collect each shoe, sensing the seed of a thought, an art installation perhaps.   With each shoe, a film short flashes in my mind.

Strappy leather.  A picnic by a river.   A kiss.

Beige canvas.  A walk through the jungle.  Birdsong.

Sparkly pink.  A birthday party.  Laughter.

Small.  A child skipping down a dusty path.  Scraped knees.  Tears.

Brown.  An old man, back bent, placing his shoes thoughtfully by his bed before his nightly prayers.  Sanctity.

I used to see single shoes on the beach when I visited here.  They lounged alongside water bottles and other plastic trash.  I used to imagine carelessness.  Ignorance.  Entitlement.

But, I live here now.  I was here for the flood.  I might know the person who walked in these shoes.

Now, I think of connection.  Community.  Loss.

I think of the man who spent the night on his kitchen counter as he watched the river wash his belongings out the door.

I think of friends.

A teacher, all her books washed away, and her daughter’s favorite stuffed animal found hanging in a neighbor’s tree.

A neighbor, searching the next morning for the shoes his wife had given him.   I found those shoes, a pair, sitting in the road some days later and returned them to him.

I think of a friend, grieving the loss of her favorite flip-flops.

I think of individuals.  Lives.  Emotions.  Humanity.

So, I collect the shoes, as I imagine lives altered.  And in doing so, I also construct the lives of the other shoes, the missing half of the pair.  I wonder how long the two made the journey as a pair. Where the other has gone.

I see one buried deep beneath the silt brought in from the river.

Another tumbling amongst rocks and waves.

On the dashboard of a car on the ocean floor.

Carried in the beak of a magnificent frigatebird, mistaken for food for her young.

Growing into a bed of coral – a new home for some sea creature.

Caught in the current alongside bottles, toothbrushes, lighters, toys.  Part of a school of plastic fish migrating toward the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

There is no way to track the life of a shoe.  But they are our artifacts.  The objects of our civilization.  Journeys have been taken in shoes.   Lives have been lived.  Love has been made.   All those shoes, those bottles, those plastics, they are the mute remnants of lives. Our lives.   Our legacy.   They are the shards of our humanity.