'Mirrors'

Emotional pain is most difficult to bear when its origins are obscure. Many of the symptoms that we experience result from our inability to connect the memories from our past to create a cohesive and sensible story of our life. Some of these memories have been suppressed in order to protect us from being overwhelmed by particularly painful experiences. The protection, unfortunately, is incomplete and requires considerable mental energy to sustain.

Our scattered memories resemble the shards or fragments of pottery that an archeologist unearths at a dig. Each fragment provides only a hint of the form and function of the whole vessel. The fragments of one vessel may even be found interspersed among the pieces of many others, so that they must be sorted one from another before each can be reassembled.

The work of healing a sickness is like finding, sorting, and putting together the pieces of an ancient pot. The work is often tedious, and some of the slivers may be sharp and dangerous. The result, if we are patient, is a beautiful object, elegant in form and function, and eloquent in the tale it tells of its creation.