I can juggle three balls (badly), provided there’s a wall to bounce them off back towards me. I can keep a hacky sack in the air for around 30 taps. I can do ‘toe basketball’ and get the ball in the basket (on the floor) with my toes, at least part of the time.
Here’s what I can’t do: stop myself from occasionally shivering the plate.
Splat! Shattered on the floor. Crash! Creak! Crinkle! “Oh crap…”
In a high-stakes game of precious good china shards vs bare feet on a linoleum floor, nobody is winning.
Many of my plates are hand-me-downs attached to memories. I look at this cup and think of the house my great-grandfather built. I look at that plate and I think of my favourite fruit cake, eaten in a formal setting, dressed to impress. The stress was high, but the cake was worth it.
When I lose one of those plates, it’s a double reminder of relationships lost and long-ago grief.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about recently: mosaic art.
South Sydney Uniting Church has a free-ish (by donation) art group that meets regularly on a Saturday morning. When people make art, they turn their emotions and ideas into tangible objects and create aesthetic beauty from truths.
If many of the losses in my life can be symbolised in a plate no bigger than 10 cm wide, many of the gains in my life can be symbolised in the act of creating beauty out of the broken pieces.
Come along to South Sydney Uniting Church on Sundays at 10am. Everyone is welcome. Gay, straight, bi, trans, black, white, Asian, Indigenous, mothers, fathers, kids, adults, brothers, sisters, cousins, humans, cyborgs, aliens: you’re welcome.
You might be surprised how good it is to create a new life in a community of people all trying to clean up a small portion of the universe.
Sunday, 10am, Factory Community Centre in Redfern. Morning tea at 11am (and you’re welcome for that if you’re not a God-botherer but like to chat). Free packaged food every week.
We’re a truly cosmopolitan mosaic. And we’re not broken.
