SPIRITUALITY
We’ve spent the past year bending. Maybe it’s time we break a little.
The class description was labeled “how to bend not break” but to be honest I was more interested in breaking. I’d grown tired of the malleability of my body and felt in that moment, that hearing a definitive crack would be more emotionally productive than continuing to bend. Certainly you can imagine the satisfaction of that sound: like a perfect sugar snap pea pod, you want the clean sound of that snap and not the wobbling uncertainty of a soft vegetable.
But if I was being honest, it wasn’t my body that was bending, it was my mind that felt uncomfortably malleable or “capable of being shaped,” per Merriam.
I imagine Merriam to be a beautiful old woman with long silver hair, the kind that makes you think she might be either a witch or the present-day Patti Smith. (Merriam isn’t an old woman, but instead, the last name of two men who bought the deceased Webster’s life’s work and placed their name alongside his. This is annoying to me.)
“A malleable material is one in which a thin sheet can be easily formed by hammering or rolling. In other words, the material has the ability to deform under compressive stress,” according to science and Dr. Ronald Redwing, Senior Lecturer, Department of Material Sciences and Engineering, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, THE Pennsylvania State University. I search for more valuable information on this Materials Science and Engineering PSU website but my options are to go back a page to learn What is brittle or go to the next page to learn The Mechanical Behavior of Ceramics. I choose to go forward because I don’t need to actively go backward to seek out more brittle in my life only to find a chart with two bold axes labeled Stress and Strain. I don’t want this in my life either.
What is it I allow to deform under compressive stress? My spirit? My certainty? What is compressive stress if not surpassing a year of a global pandemic in which we started out wiping down our groceries wearing gloves and we are now still waiting for grandparents to get a second shot so they can hug their grandkids.
I’m tired. I digress. Perhaps I deform.
There’s this game of emotional cat and mouse that I want to label as “odd” or “unique” but it’s neither. I want to bend and break. I want to be malleable when it suits me and I want to shatter when I need to start over. I want to be brittle and flexible, I want to soften and have sharp edges. I want to crumble into breadcrumbs to find my way back home to myself. I want all of my little pieces to scatter but then be sewn together again by my mother’s golden thread.
Perhaps breaking sounded so delightful because it meant something was so strong it had no ability to bend. So resolute in its make-up, so resolved in its composition it couldn’t be swayed — it instead chooses to shatter. And I think that’s what keeps drawing me in. The perceived grandeur of fortitude. The unwillingness to be hammered into something else. Just me. Skin and bones and shards of completed-ness.
