I can’t tell you how many times, over my 32 year journey with autism, I have returned to this quote for inspiration:
On July 4, 1999, a twenty-minute maelstrom of hurricane force winds took down twenty million trees across the Boundary Waters. A month later, when I made my annual pilgrimage up north, I was heartbroken by the ruin and wondered whether I wanted to return. And yet on each visit since, I have been astonished to see how nature uses devastation to stimulate new growth, slowly but persistently healing her own wounds. Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness—mine, your, ours—need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life. (Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.)
It’s not only Joel’s autism that makes me hunt down this quote on a regular basis. It’s family members with deep depression; my own bouts of anxiety; my mother’s worsening dementia; the terrible images of Houston and Puerto Rico, decimated by Hurricanes Harvey and Maria. I could go on and on. Just turn on the evening news and you see image after image of brokenness.
