Fracture Healing Quotes

Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they will hold you close. To love is to trust, to trust is to have faith. How else are you meant to love? You knew what you were getting into, but taking the Underground, returning home with no certainty of when you will see her next, it is terrifying.

A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon. Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.” A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend. Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.

an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.

You are caught between all that was and all that must be. You feel lost. Mark my words: as soon as the bones mend, you will forget about the fracture.

You cannot restore and heal in the same environment that made you ill.

Those look like broken ribs," Hunt said wryly. "Definitely broken ribs, Athalar," Bryce replied, sitting back on her heels. "And a broken arm, from the way he's cradling it." "Skull fracture's healed," Hunt observed with equal distance, as if they were on one of his favorite Vanir crime show procedurals. Ithan's eyes flashed again. "I'm sensing hostility and a good dose of male pride," Bryce said. "Throw in some stubbornness and I'd say we've got a classic case of stupidity," Hunt answered. "What the fuck is wrong with you two?" Ithan demanded.

A fractured team is just like a broken arm or leg; fixing it is always painful, and sometimes you have to rebreak it to make it heal correctly. And the rebreak hurts a lot more than the initial break, because you have to do it on purpose P.37

Time doesn't heal all wounds, handy lie though it may be. Time forces acceptance of what cannot be changed.

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt—and have hurt others—are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity. I thought of the guards strapping Jimmy Dill to the gurney that very hour. I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind of victory. I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we’ve pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we’ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we’ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible. But simply punishing the broken—walking away from them or hiding them from sight—only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.

Trust your scars to find who they need to heal. Understand that people will leave your life and make allowance for it, no matter how unwilling you are to let them go.

Lumani had never managed a failed delivery because, in the end, no matter how skilled or how hard they fought back, pressure applied in the right places caused even the strongest men to fracture. But this one? He'd watched her. Studied her. Observed what maybe even Uncle, the reader of people, had missed. This one was already fractured, and the lines between her broken pieces were not fissures but scar material stronger than whatever had once filled those spaces.

You could never have influenced the fate of your father; besides, he’d want you to carry his name with honour and dignity.

You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they hold you close

It seems like the more my body healed, the more fractured my mind became, and there aren't enough wires and screws to fix he breaks in it.

My lip healed. So did my head. My pride stayed bruised, though, and my confidence was fractured. Those injuries, the ones that didn’t show, I would have to live with.

The wounded mind must be reset like a fractured bone. It cannot heal itself without spiritual realignment.

lives get knit together like bones, and fractures might not heal.

We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

In Eugenia Leigh’s poem “Gold,” she writes, “Tell me // I am not the thing / my children will have to survive. / Tell me // the mob I inherited will not touch / my son. Yes, the cavalcade / of all that’s tried to kill me // may forever raid my brain, but know / this: in my mother’s first language, / the word for fracture, for crack, / is the same as the word for gold.”[1

I felt his pain as my own and I wanted to touch him, feel him, reach inside his fractured heart and pull out all of the love he buried inside. I wanted to kiss every inch of his skin. I wanted to feel his brokenness against mine, like if we held each other hard enough something within each of us would finally heal.

Clearly, it is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous. We must find ways to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity— birth, marriage, death—without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality. Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Muslim, or Jewish be widely recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is. And only then will we stand a chance of healing the deepest and most dangerous fractures in our world.

We can do this, Flame. Our souls may still be fractured, but they are healing. Someday, only faint scars will remain.” “I don’t believe in much,” I confessed. My eyes closed. I was tired. “But I believe in you, Maddie. I’ve always believed in you.

Healing restores to wholeness that which has been injured or fragmented.

We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our humanity.

But swan, float lightly because you are a swan, because by the exquisite curve of your neck the gods gave you some special favor, and even though you fracture it running against some man-made bridge, it healed and you sailed onward.-- F. Scott Fitzgerald to his wife Zelda.

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt—and have hurt others—are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we never would have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source for our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

You know to love is to both swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they will hold you close. To love is to trust, to trust is to have faith.

There were two things about this particular book (The Golden Book of Fairy Tales) that made it vital to the child I was. First, it contained a remarkable number of stories about courageous, active girls; and second, it portrayed the various evils they faced in unflinching terms. Just below their diamond surface, these were stories of great brutality and anguish, many of which had never been originally intended for children at all. (Although Ponsot included tales from the Brothers Grimm and Andersen, the majority of her selections were drawn from the French contes de fées tradition — stories created as part of the vogue for fairy tales in seventeenth century Paris, recounted in literary salons and published for adult readers.) I hungered for a narrative with which to make some sense of my life, but in schoolbooks and on television all I could find was the sugar water of Dick and Jane, Leave it to Beaver and the happy, wholesome Brady Bunch. Mine was not a Brady Bunch family; it was troubled, fractured, persistently violent, and I needed the stronger meat of wolves and witches, poisons and peril. In fairy tales, I had found a mirror held up to the world I knew — where adults were dangerous creatures, and Good and Evil were not abstract concepts. (…) There were in those days no shelves full of “self–help” books for people with pasts like mine. In retrospect, I’m glad it was myth and folklore I turned to instead. Too many books portray child abuse as though it’s an illness from which one must heal, like cancer . . .or malaria . . .or perhaps a broken leg. Eventually, this kind of book promises, the leg will be strong enough to use, despite a limp betraying deeper wounds that might never mend. Through fairy tales, however, I understood my past in different terms: not as an illness or weakness, but as a hero narrative. It was a story, my story, beginning with birth and ending only with death. Difficult challenges and trials, even those that come at a tender young age, can make us wiser, stronger, and braver; they can serve to transform us, rather than sending us limping into the future.

Do you remember what I told you? About the philosophy behind this? That something which is unique has its own beauty that can never be destroyed; that it’s always worth mending, even when it’s broken; and that the fractures and the scars become part of the beauty too, making the piece even more remarkable, even more precious.” And then she said, “Heal your heart, Ella. Let Angus help you. Mend your marriage with veins of the purest gold and remake it, better and stronger than before.” And we did. Because, you see, Kendra, I fell in love with your grandfather all over again. Caroline was right: our love was worth mending. In the end, we made the scars part of the beauty of our marriage.’ She

Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We

Jesus’s final prayer was oriented around a vision for unity, and he commissioned his church to be the healing agent that brings the ministry of reconciliation into broken and fractured places in society. And yet an honest assessment raises more questions than answers. Is the church at large, and are we as individuals, currently making any contribution to healing the divisions? Or are we making things worse? Have we come to grips with our role in creating this divide, or are we stuck in a state of denial?

We are not ‘everything,’ but neither are we ‘nothing.’ Spirituality is discovered in that space between paradox’s extremes, for there we confront our helplessness and powerlessness, our woundedness. In seeking to understand our limitations, we seek not only an easing of our pain but an understanding of what it means to hurt and what it means to be healed. Spirituality begins with the acceptance that our fractured being, our imperfection, simply is: There is no one to ‘blame’ for our errors — neither ourselves nor anyone nor anything else. Spirituality helps us first to see, and then to understand, and eventually to accept the imperfection that lies at the very core of our human be-ing.

Skin heals, broken hearts mend, and eventually emotions become less fraught and torn, but memories never fade

It was the moths that first revealed the change. Grey-tipped whispers in the moonlit night. Two or three here, a single one there. White ones slipping through the darkness, silent and seemingly harmless, but present. Growing in numbers until they erupted the quiet like flutters of falling ash. There was a music in their silence. The kind of music that attached itself to hums and vibrations in the waters of the earth. The hums, the vibrations, all but imperceptible. With the dawn the moths vanished, leaving a broken land in their wake. The Elian River leaked out into fissures of streams and brooks that first appeared as watery cracks throughout the Faeran Valley. So small at first, we didn't recognize the difference. But as the months and years passed, the Elian slipped further and deeper into the growing fractures of earth the moths had left. Trails of watery branches and veins that broke the ground until it couldn't sustain life any longer. This is what we have against the Bremistans. The land is delicate now, brittle like old bones. And I fear it is aging beyond our ability to heal it....

Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We

Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world's sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis of our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

With Colleen’s passing, something fractured inside of Simon. Something like a bone—a part of him that, even if it managed to heal, would always bear evidence of its imperfection. A tiny part of him that would always be broken.

We don’t open our hearts by being a tower of strength. We don’t open our hearts by glossing over things in our head. We open our hearts by feeling what we feel. We open our hearts by being vulnerable, honest, and gentle. We’ve become so strong, so self-sufficient. I can deal with that, we say. No big deal. I’ll keep moving on. Yet many circumstances we’ve been through, and some we’re going through now, cause break lines in our heart. Some of the fractures are small. Some are big. They really hurt. Maybe certain people in our lives weren’t there for us, aren’t there for us now in a way we’d like them to be. Maybe some deceived us unconsciously or betrayed us deliberately. I can deal with that, we say. I understand. They have their own issues. I forgive… Yes, people do have their own issues. And we do forgive. But now it may be time to learn gentleness, compassion, understanding, and forgiveness for ourselves as well. We don’t open our hearts by ignoring the break lines. We take our hand, knowing it’s held by God, and gently run our fingers across each crack. Yes, it’s there. Yes, I feel it. Yes, I’m ready to heal my heart.

I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

Fever is a symptom of your body when it is undergoing the process of fighting against illness or disorder. It is necessary to know if we get sick or ill. Most of the time, we ignore fever and let our body fight against any enemies causing bodily disorder, which includes a rise in temperature. We perspire to neutralise and balance our body temperature. Hence, fever means that our body is fighting…self-curing…a wonderful self-healing process of the well-engineered human system design by the Creator.

Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

but it was the doctor’s body, the sudden way he moved the folders on his desk, the way he moved back from Harmon, that Harmon would always remember. As though he had known what Harmon didn’t know, that lives get knit together like bones, and fractures might not heal.

My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself. Being close to suffering, death, executions, and cruel punishments didn't just illuminate the brokenness of others; in a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You can't effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it. We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. The ways in which I have been hurt - and have hurt others - are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity. I thought of the guards strapping Jimmy Dill to the gurney that very hour. I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind of victory. I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We've become so fearful and vengeful that we've thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak - not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we've pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we've legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we've allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We've submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible. But simply punishing the broken - walking away from them or hiding them from sight - only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity. I frequently had difficult conversations with clients who were struggling and despairing over their situations - over the things they'd done, or had been done to them, that had led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lives, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar. If you take something that doesn't belong to you, you are not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. I told myself that evening what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things that you can't otherwise see; you hear things you can't otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.

He was trying to make it up to her, asking for forgiveness and seeking redemption all at once, sacrificing himself for her. It was a glimpse of who he’d once been, the poet her maman had fallen in love with. That man, the one before the war, might have known another way, might have found the perfect words to heal their fractured past.

God can handle all your needs, mend the heart that hurts and bleeds, give the lonely something true that changes lives and makes them new. Jesus heals the fractured soul, makes it breathe, makes it whole, gives us hope when hope is gone, breaks the darkness, offers dawn, to all who follow, all who dare— the door is open, love is there.

Loss changed you. But you could heal. You could repair your fractured spirit with golden lacquer and hold on to life. That life wouldn’t look the same ever again. But it didn’t mean that it wouldn’t be worthwhile. That it wouldn’t be beautiful. Perhaps loss taught a person to love life more. Because you understood what it was like to lose that life. You wouldn’t take it for granted anymore.

Jillian took another step. The weaving abruptly stopped, and she pressed the blade of his own knife to his neck. He felt its cold bite. Their gazes met. “I have just one question for you,” she whispered. The edge broke skin effortlessly, and he felt blood trickle down his throat in a thin fracture. Her green eyes flickered to the wound, and Luca knew it had already healed. “Then ask.” “Do you sparkle?

There were perhaps only three feet between them now—three feet and months and months of missing and hating him. Months of crawling out of that abyss he’d shoved her into. But now that she was here … Everything was an effort not to say she was sorry. Sorry not for what she’d done to his face, but for the fact that her heart was healed—still fractured in spots, but healed—and he … he was not in it. Not as he’d once been.

As long as there is hunger, poverty and treatable disease in the world there is work for us to do. As long as nations fight, and men hate, and corruption stalks the corridors of power; as long as there is unemployment and homelessness, depression and despair, our task is not yet done, and we hear, if we listen carefully enough, the voice of God asking us, as he asked the first humans, ‘Where are you?’ Hassidim tell the story of the

I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

Lies, unattended to, affect the perceptions we form. The perceptions we form eventually become the beliefs we carry. The beliefs we carry determine what we see. That’s why we must be so careful to recognize where lies are affecting us. Our faith can get fractured by the lies we let inform our beliefs. Our faith in God can get fractured by the lies we let inform our beliefs. I’ve come to realize that what makes faith fall apart isn’t doubt. It’s being too certain of the wrong things.

The results of his scans clearly show evidence of malunion fractures that went untreated and healed improperly. There’s very clear evidence of a poorly healed midshaft fracture to his right humerus. Unfortunately, this is something commonly seen in infants under the age of eighteen months who have been exposed to physical abuse. In your partner’s case, while his bones may have healed over time, many of the injuries his body sustained left residual shadows. Or blemishes, if you will.

Although there are dramatic differences in the way the two forms of trauma can affect people's lives and functioning—the big-T variety, in general, being far more distressing and disabling—there is also much overlap. They both represent afracturing of the self and of one's relationship to the world. That fracturing is the essence of trauma. As Peter Levine writes, trauma "is about a loss of connection—to ourselves, our families, and the world around us. This loss is hard to recognize, because it happens slowly, over time.

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent...We are bodies of broken bones...Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

God’s first question to humankind was, ‘Where are you?’ (Gen. 3:9). That is the question heard by those who have internalized the ethic of responsibility. Faith is a form of listening, and what we hear in the still silence of the soul is God’s question: ‘What have you done with the gift I gave you, of life? How have you used your time? Have you lived for yourself alone or have you lived also for others? Is your primary question, What can the world give me? or is it, What can I give to the world? Have you sought blessing, or have you been a blessing?

In writing this, I am not being political, but am rather pointing out the deeply divided condition of the nation. Divisions range from politics to religion to race. Not since the Civil War have we seen so many fractures in so many places at such deep levels. We are no longer “one nation” and no longer does our nation regard itself to be “under God” in any effective sense. The bad news is that we are beyond healing. Certain trends have been allowed to go too far unchecked and we now live with a shattered national consciousness, a downgraded consciousness of morality and a broken sense of who we are as a people.

Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burntout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an “F” in Chemistry and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an “A” in psychology.

I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

READER’S REPORT From the Parent of a College Coed Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burntout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an “F” in Chemistry and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an “A” in psychology.

Yes, there is a human nature and that human nature is build for love and contact. It is build for connection, it is build for mutual protection, it is build for mutual aid. And when we rear people in base of all society on the lines that transgress those needs, we're gonna get exactly what we have today. Which is a society which is increasingly conflicted, increasingly fractured, increasingly disconnected and where human pathology is, despite all the advances of medicine, chronic human pathology is on the rise. Western medicine does not recognize that the pathologies are manifestations of our life, that diseases don't have a life of their own, that diseases express the life of the individual. And if that individual's life is changed, so can the disease in many, many cases. And furthermore, that human beings have an innate healing capacity. There is a healing capacity in all living beings, plant or animal. And along with the wonders and contributions of Western medicine we could do so much more if we actually respected and evoked and encouraged that healing capacity that is within the individual, which is very much connected to the emergence of the true self. Now, for that, you need the truth. That means, we actually have to look at what is going on. And there is so much denial in this society. My own profession is a prime example. The average doctor does not hear the information I gave you about asthma. They couldn't explain it, even though the physiology is straightforward. For all the trauma in this society, the average physician does not hear the word "trauma" in all their years of training. Not that they don't get a lecture, not that they don't get a course, they don't even hear the word, except in the physical sense, physical trauma. Teachers are not taught that the human child's brain is still developing and that the conditions for healthy brain development is the presence of nurturing and responsive adults. And that schools are not knowledge factories, they are places where human development needs to be nurtured. That's a very different proposition for an educational system. And the courts don't get it. The courts think that if a human is behaving badly, it is a choice they're making, therefore they need to be punished. For some strange reason, certain minority groups have to be punished more than the average, like in my country 5% of the population is native, and they are 25% of the jail population now. And of course when we ask the question if the science is straightforward — as I believe it to be — and the conclusions are as clear as I believe them to be, why don't we just embrace it and follow it and do something about it? Well.. the reason for that is obvious, because if everything I just said happens to be true, which I firmly believe to be true, and if it is.. everything would have to change. How we teach parents would have to change, how we treat family would have to change, how we support young parents would have to change, how we pass laws, how we educate people, how we run the economy. We have to do something different. Getting to that something different has to begin with an inquiry and I hope I've said enough to encourage you to continue on that path of inquiry.

Laurie started to really believe that her mind was healing her body by thought alone. And the old fracture that was connected to the old self was healing, because she was literally becoming someone else. She was no longer firing and wiring the circuits in her brain that were connected to the old personality, because she was no longer thinking and acting in the same ways. She stopped conditioning her body to the same mind by reliving her past with the same emotions. She was “unmemorizing” being her old self and remembering being a new self—that is, firing and wiring new thoughts and actions in her brain by changing her mind and emotionally teaching her body what her future self would feel like. Laurie was signaling new genes in new ways during her daily meditation by simply changing her state of being. Those genes were making new proteins that were healing the proteins responsible for the fractures related to her “dis-ease.” From what she learned in the workshops, she reasoned that her bone cells needed to get the right signal from her mind in order to turn off the gene of fibrous dysplasia and turn on the gene for the production of a normal bone matrix.

Polyfragmentation and Engineered DID Over 20 years ago, I was made aware of a subset of patients with DID who did not develop DID organically but as a deliberate creation through trauma-based mind control. These clients present differently from those with organic DID and have different needs to be met in therapy. From early childhood, they have been subjected to a form of human slavery where their minds have been systematically fractured with traumatic experiences and then rebuilt in such a way that they could be programmed and controlled over the course of their lifespan by handlers. The people with engineered DID challenge even the most sophisticated and experienced trauma clinicians, because part of their programming is to avoid detection and foil treatment with therapists. The groups that 'train' these people consider them expensive assets and will not let them leave or heal easily. They surround the programming and parts with various 'booby traps' that can derail therapy, confuse or distract the therapist, and disable or even kill the client. It is a very specific subspecialty in trauma treatment, one that requires a great deal of education and support to do well.

In Healing the Masculine Soul, Dalbey introduced themes that would animate what soon became a cottage industry of books on Christian masculinity. First and foremost, Dalbey looked to the Vietnam War as the source of masculine identity. The son of a naval officer, Dalbey described how the image of the war hero served as his blueprint for manhood. He’d grown up playing “sandlot soldier” in his white suburban neighborhood, and he’d learned to march in military drills and fire a rifle in his Boy Scout “patrol.” Fascinated with John Wayne’s WWII movies, he imagined war “only as a glorious adventure in manhood.” As he got older, he “passed beyond simply admiring the war hero to desiring a war” in which to demonstrate his manhood. 20 By the time he came of age, however, he’d become sidetracked. Instead of demonstrating his manhood on the battlefields of Vietnam, he became “part of a generation of men who actively rejected our childhood macho image of manhood—which seemed to us the cornerstone of racism, sexism, and militarism.” Exhorted to make love, not war, he became “an enthusiastic supporter of civil rights, women’s liberation, and the antiwar movement,” and he joined the Peace Corps in Africa. But in opting out of the military he would discover that “something required of manhood seemed to have been bypassed, overlooked, even dodged.” Left “confused and frustrated,” Dalbey eventually conceded that “manhood requires the warrior.” 21 Dalbey agreed with Bly that an unbalanced masculinity had led to the nation’s “unbalanced pursuit” of the Vietnam War, but an over-correction had resulted in a different problem: Having rejected war making as a model of masculine strength, men had essentially abdicated that strength to women. As far as Dalbey was concerned, the 1970s offered no viable model of manhood to supplant “the boyhood image in our hearts,” and his generation had ended up rejecting manhood itself. If the warrior spirit was indeed intrinsic to males, then attempts to eliminate the warrior image were “intrinsically emasculating.” Women were “crying out” for men to recover their manly strength, Dalbey insisted. They were begging men to toughen up and take charge, longing for a prince who was strong and bold enough to restore their “authentic femininity.” 22 Unfortunately, the church was part of the problem. Failing to present the true Jesus, it instead depicted him “as a meek and gentle milk-toast character”—a man who never could have inspired “brawny fishermen like Peter to follow him.” It was time to replace this “Sunday school Jesus” with a warrior Jesus. Citing “significant parallels” between serving Christ and serving in the military, Dalbey suggested that a “redeemed image of the warrior” could reinvigorate the church’s ministry to men: “What if we told men up front that to join the church of Jesus Christ is . . . to enlist in God’s army and to place their lives on the line? This approach would be based on the warrior spirit in every man, and so would offer the greatest hope for restoring authentic Christian manhood to the Body of Christ.” Writing before the Gulf War had restored faith in American power and the strength of the military, Dalbey’s preoccupation with Vietnam is understandable, yet the pattern he established would endure long after an easy victory in the latter conflict supposedly brought an end to “Vietnam syndrome.” American evangelicals would continue to be haunted by Vietnam. 23

When I hung up the phone that night I had a wet face and a broken heart. The lack of compassion I witnessed every day had finally exhausted me. I looked around my crowded office, at the stacks of records and papers, each pile filled with tragic stories, and I suddenly didn’t want to be surrounded by all this anguish and misery. As I sat there, I thought myself a fool for having tried to fix situations that were so fatally broken. It’s time to stop. I can’t do this anymore. For the first time I realized my life was just full of brokenness. I worked in a broken system of justice. My clients were broken by mental illness, poverty, and racism. They were torn apart by disease, drugs and alcohol, pride, fear, and anger. I thought of Joe Sullivan and of Trina, Antonio, Ian, and dozens of other broken children we worked with, struggling to survive in prison. I thought of people broken by war, like Herbert Richardson; people broken by poverty, like Marsha Colbey; people broken by disability, like Avery Jenkins. In their broken state, they were judged and condemned by people whose commitment to fairness had been broken by cynicism, hopelessness, and prejudice. I looked at my computer and at the calendar on the wall. I looked again around my office at the stacks of files. I saw the list of our staff, which had grown to nearly forty people. And before I knew it, I was talking to myself aloud: “I can just leave. Why am I doing this?” It took me a while to sort it out, but I realized something sitting there while Jimmy Dill was being killed at Holman prison. After working for more than twenty-five years, I understood that I don’t do what I do because it’s required or necessary or important. I don’t do it because I have no choice. I do what I do because I’m broken, too. My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself. Being close to suffering, death, executions, and cruel punishments didn’t just illuminate the brokenness of others; in a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it. We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt––and have hurt others––are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

I thought my life had fractured that day, and in truth it had. But just like a fractured limb, it’s stronger now, in those broken places that have healed.

With tinny drumbeats, the rain pounds the roof My teary eyes compete They can't keep up Breathe Let it go Breathe The vice on my chest tightens its razoring grip I gasp No relief If only tears could soothe the pain Then, I would look upon the tidal waves against these walls without fear Crush and roll me, I'd plead, Mold my body anew But with these tears come no healing, Just death, slow and determined This old girl, this old woman, this old soul lives here inside A tortoise outgrowing this hare's body This youthful skin encasing a crumbling frame I smooth the matted web of curls off my sweaty neck And roll my eyes at the clock How slowly the time squeaks by here in this room, In this comfortless bed I abandon the warmth from under my blanket tower and shiver The draft rattles my spine One by one, striking my vertebrae Like a spoon chiming empty wine glasses, Hitting the same fragile note till my neck shakes the chill away I swipe along the naked floor with a toe for the slippers beneath the bed Plush fabric caresses my feet Stand! Get up With both hands, Gravity jerks me back down Ugh! This cursed bed! No more, I want no more of it I try again My legs quiver in search of my former strength Come on, old girl, Come on, old woman, Come on, old soul, Don't quit now The floor shakes beneath me, Hoping I trip and fall To the living room window, I trudge My joints grind like gravel under tires More pain no amount of tears can soothe away Pinching the embroidered curtain between my knuckles, I find solace in the gloom The wind humming against the window, Makes the house creak and groan Years ago, the cold numbed my pain But can it numb me again, This wretched body and fractured soul? Outside I venture with chants fluttering my lips, Desperate solemn pleas For comfort, For mercy For ease, For health I open the plush throw spiraled around my shoulders And tiptoe around the porch's rain-soaked boards The chilly air moves through me like Death on a mission, My body, an empty gorge with no barriers to stop him, No flesh or bone My highest and lowest extremities grow numb But my feeble knees and crippling bones turn half-stone, half-bone Half-alive, half-dead No better, just worse The merciless wind freezes my tears My chin tumbles in despair I cover myself and sniffle Earth’s scent funnels up my nose: Decay with traces of life in its perfume The treetops and their slender branches sway, Defying the bitter gusts As I turn to seek shelter, the last browned leaf breaks away It drifts, it floats At the weary tree’s feet, it makes its bed alongside the others Like a pile of corpses, they lie Furled and crinkled with age No one mourns their death Or hurries to honor the fallen with thoughtful burials No rage-filled cries echo their protests at the paws trampling their fragile bodies, Or at the desecration by the animals seeking morning relief And new boundaries to mark Soon, the stark canopy stretching over the pitiful sight Will replace them with vibrant buds and leaves Until the wasting season again returns For now, more misery will barricade my bones as winter creeps in Unless Death meets me first to end it

Do you remember what I told you? About the philosophy behind this? That something which is unique has its own beauty that can never be destroyed; that it’s always worth mending, even when it’s broken; and that the fractures and the scars become part of the beauty too, making the piece even more remarkable, even more precious.” And then she said, “Heal your heart, Ella. Let Angus help you. Mend your marriage with veins of the purest gold and remake it, better and stronger than before.” And we did. Because, you see, Kendra, I fell in love with your grandfather all over again. Caroline was right: our love was worth mending. In the end, we made the scars part of the beauty of our marriage.

Love can provide a cushion, but it doesn’t heal the fractures of our soul. That responsibility lies on us.

Humans are fragile creatures. We fracture easily, and there are some pains even magic can't heal. Broken hearts. Empty bellies. Lost dreams.

There were some fractures that never healed, no matter how much time passed and no matter how you moved on. They were just there . . . marring the person you wanted to rise above. But those fractures, those dim little scars . . . wouldn’t go away quietly.

Hellfire and brimstone don’t inspire us to change; they lead to guilt. Guilt is a coping mechanism that allows us to merely limp along with our anxiety. It’s what we feel when we engage in some action that goes against our deeper principles, but that we don’t actually intend to change. Guilt is an insincere self-apology for a painful internal fracture. It leads us to symbolic actions that allow us to function with this fracture. Why not just heal the fracture?

The longer I live, the more I wonder if my inability to see God in my pain is rooted in the fact that I’m not really looking for God. I’m looking for a god to show up in the way that I want him to and to give me what I want him to give me. I’m like the disciples; I beg Jesus to stop my storm now. I’m like Mary and Martha; I want Jesus to heal my sick brother now. Some like to think that because Jesus suffered once, we never will have to. That because Jesus was wounded, we’re promised permanent healing; that if He was abandoned by God, we never will be. But what if the very fellowship of His suffering is meant to draw us closer to Him? What if our very pain is meant to help us see Him more clearly?

Pain’s gift is that it increases awareness. Suffering heightens our sense of need and deepens our heart’s cry for help. While suffering hurts, a growing sense of God’s presence heals.

For me things got messier before they got better. Breakthrough came through the unexpected form of God’s people. Though it was God’s people who had hurt me, they became the tool God used to heal my broken heart. A loving pastor who wouldn’t give up on me. His wife who understood me. A small church community who saw past my defenses. Though it was God’s people who fueled the deconstruction of my faith, it was also God’s people who would become the building blocks for its reconstruction.

A few years ago, Kobe [Bryant, duh] fractured the fourth metacarpal bone in his right hand. He missed the first fifteen games of the season; he used the opportunity to learn to shoot jump shots with his left, which he has been known to do in games. While it was healing, the ring finger, the one adjacent to the break, spend a lot of time taped to his pinkie. In the end, Kobe discovered, his four fingers were no longer evenly spaced; now they were separated, two and two. As a result, his touch on the ball was different, his shooting percentage went down. Studying the film he noticed that his shots were rotating slightly to the right. To correct the flaw, Kobe went to the gym over the summer and made one hundred thousand shots. that's one hundred thousand made, not taken. He doesn't practice taking shots, he explains. He practices making them. If you're clear on the difference between the two ideas, you can start drawing a bead on Kobe Bryant who may well be one of the most misunderstood figures in sports today. Scito Hoc Super Omnia by Mike Sager for Esquire Magazine Nov 2007

Recommended Protocol for Reducing Inflammation I recommend the following supplementation for my patients with elevated biomarkers of inflammation and oxidative stress: vitamin C (500 to 1,000 mg/day); vitamin E (200 to 400 IU/day of mixed tocopherols); vitamin K (K1 and K2 MK-4 and MK-7 450 mcg to 5 mg/day); alpha-lipoic acid (300 to 600mg/day—not recommended for people withgastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD)); coenzyme Q10 (100 mg/day); milk thistle (400 mg/day); N-acetyl cysteine (500 to 1,000 mg, three times a day); taurine (1 to 3 g/day); fish oil (2 to 3 g/day); berberine (500 mg/day, or 1,000 mg/day short-term for those with intestinal dysbiosis, a condition of microbial imbalances); rho-iso-alpha acids (500 mg/day); probiotics (3 to 20 billion/day); and DHEA (25 mg/day), when indicated.

The following lists some of the signs and symptoms of gluten sensitivity: diarrhea or loose stools, abdominal pain, bloating or abdominal distention, excessive gas, pale and foul-smelling stool, irritability, depression, weight loss, anemia, fatigue, general weakness, muscle cramps, achy legs, tingling in the face or extremities, dermatitis herpetiformis (painful skin rash or rough texture), mouth sores and mottled tooth discoloration. If you note that you have more than three of these signs or symptoms, it may indicate you have a sensitivity to gluten.

He stayed there, quiet now, feeling a pure and strangely joyful pain wash over him, knowing that as much as it hurt, it was something he had to accept, a winter before the spring, letting its ice freeze and fracture his heart before it could heal.

I’m Fine I stand on the precipice of solitude, A tempest raging within, unseen by all. They depart, like autumn leaves in the wind, Their absence a hollow echo, a fading call. I don’t care who leaves my life, Their footsteps erased from the sands of time. The bonds we wove, now frayed and brittle, Yet I stand resolute, unyielding, in my prime. The pain, a searing fire, consumes my chest, Anger coils like vipers, venomous and cold. They say love is a balm, a healing touch, But what if love itself is the blade that unfolds? I lose them, one by one, like stars in the night, Their constellations fading, swallowed by the void. Yet I cling to my essence, my fractured soul, For in this desolation, I find strength, unalloyed. I don’t care who I lose, for they are but shadows, Their laughter, their tears, mere echoes in the gale. As long as I don’t lose myself, my core unshaken, I’ll wear this mask of indifference, my heart’s veiled tale. So let them depart, let them fade into oblivion, I’ll stand here, battered and scarred, but alive. For I am the tempest, the flame, the unyielding force, And in this fractured existence, I’m fine

Lor—” “No, let me say my piece. I’ve never seen you like this. There’s a peace in you that’s more than I could’ve hoped for. She healed you.” I laid my hand over Lor’s, squeezing her fingers. “We healed each other.” She stared down at the contact. “I’ll love her forever for that.

I’m not saying shit because I regret saying it, Reed. Yes, I fucking meant it. I love you so badly, I can hardly stand it. But I didn’t mean to put that on you when you’re going through so much.” “You don’t try and influence or control me. You want me to be who I am. And Mason, I want that for you too. The good, the bad, the ugly; I hope you know I accept all of it. I accept all of you.” “I’m not good enough for you, Reed.” “You are. Just like I’m good enough for you, even if I didn’t believe that when I first came here. And do you want to know why?” He nods, words not getting out, and I’ve never seen him this vulnerable. “Because yes… we’re both fractured and still healing, but we don’t bring out the pain in each other. We bring out the good. You bring out my good, Mason. And that’s all I want to do for you.

You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they will hold you close. To love is to trust, to trust is to have faith. How else are you meant to love?

We own what we are willing to share. That is tzedakah: charity as justice.

Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by a worker at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burnt out dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an F in Chemistry, and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Author’s note: Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an A in psychology.

You can stand the emotional intensity of visiting the wreckage of your trauma-fractured life for only a few seconds before your brain starts to do things to protect you from the pain.

Having friends can help the fractures in your life heal faster

We are in a time of intense turmoil and flux. This turmoil has the potential to transform us, if we let it. It is as if the world is going through a profound healing crisis, much like our bodies do when we are ill. During a healing crisis, all the toxins are pulled up to the surface to be felt and seen so that we often feel worse before we feel better. It is a necessary stage in the journey as we become aware of the mess we have created, not just for ourselves but for the planet. The toxic nature of old systems, structures, and patterns is being seen in the stark light of day, and it is difficult to stomach. Yet, this is all part of the healing process. Once we accept this, we are in a position to work on the underlying causes of our health and planetary crises. We can delve deep into our inner recesses, unearthing the root causes of our stress, our disconnection, and our polarization. Only when we begin to heal those fragmented parts of ourselves can we begin to feel whole again, mending the fractures we have caused in the web of life.

Tell me what you’re hiding, what you’re harboring, what you don’t want the world to know about yourself for fear that it will be cast into light. Tell me about the times you couldn’t save yourself. Give me your broken parts, your fractured pieces, everything that’s weighed too heavily on the floor of your heart for you to ever reach down and reassemble. Tell me where you went the first time that you lost yourself. Tell me the ways in which you never came back. Give me a map with coordinates that lead into the deepest, most twisted corner of your soul where all of your unconquered demons still lurk. Let me see them. Let me reach out and touch them with my own trembling fingers, because I still can’t bear to face my own. Give me your shortcomings. Tell me the story of the first person you never became and all the ways in which you let him die. Tell me which regrets tear on your heartstrings and which unfulfilled dreams still take up residence under your skin. Show me the mountains you never conquered, the roads you never traversed, the battles you surrendered before ever setting foot upon enemy soil. Show me the things you never measured up to because there’s no war more wounding than the one we never waged and there’s no road more daunting than the one that we never walked down. Give me your struggles and impurities. Tell me about the worst thing you have ever done. Tell me about the regret that slithered under your skin and beat through your bloodstream like an unwelcome disease after you made the biggest mistake of your life. Tell me how it ripped straight into to your soul and took you over. Talk to me about the times you couldn’t look at yourself in the mirror or fall asleep at night because the malevolence and madness of your own mind kept you reeling. Give me your vices and misjudgments because I can match each one with my own. Tell me all the ways in which you’re scarred by your own capacity for darkness. Let me fall in love with your human parts – the battles you can’t fight, the wounds you can’t heal, all the ways in which you are not enough for yourself. Give me your joys and your pain in equal measure because you are the most brilliant and terrible mixture of both. I don’t want your good intentions and your well wishes. I want the whole of you, the depth of you, the breadth of all you are and the light that shines in between your broken parts. Let me fall in love with what you’re missing, what you’ve lost and what you’re still holding onto, through and despite all of it. Show me the things you haven’t lost along the way. And I will show you your own greatest strengths.

I know it’s not,” Chaol said. His eyes flicked to where Goldryn peeked over her shoulder. “New sword?” She nodded. There were perhaps only three feet between them now—three feet and months and months of missing and hating him. Months of crawling out of that abyss he’d shoved her into. But now that she was here … Everything was an effort not to say she was sorry. Sorry not for what she’d done to his face, but for the fact that her heart was healed—still fractured in spots, but healed—and he … he was not in it. Not as he’d once been.

I'm an orthopedist. You probably know that when a bone is broken, it heals stronger because a knot forms around the fracture. The body, when given an opportunity to make up for an absence, may do so excessively, and recover to the point where it has more of that quality then those who had never suffered such inadequacy.

The environment we create can help heal us or fracture us. This is true not just for buildings and landscapes but also for interactions and relationships.

I believe that books, like people, come to us at the perfect time, with a purpose to either bring awareness to something we need to see or further guide us on our path.

But why does it matter what we call it, as long as there is concerted action to respond to and prevent such crimes? It matters because if we really want to fix something that is broken, if we want to heal these fractures in our society, then we need to understand their causes. If we do not, then we will forever continue to place giant sticking plasters over the wounds left by this violence, trying to bandage over losses that can never be replaced. As long as this violence continues, it is obviously the case that we do have to address the symptoms, but my argument is that we must also address the causes if we want a long-term reduction or even, perhaps, the eventual eradication of male violence against women.

Shut up, shut up, will you! Nobody minds that you are in pain. Pain is a human condition. You do not care that I am hungry, do you? And therefore I do not need to care whether you are in agony. Nobody is hurting you! Be quiet, be quiet! Rannig, fill his mouth with dirt, and I’m sure I do not care what diseases he contracts. He has already been in the water. He has probably swallowed millions of pestilential microbes, and they are none of them acting too quickly. Do you hear me? I say shut up, sir! By my hat—the man makes a noise to shatter teeth! Here, what are you complaining about?” Bartleby looked over and saw where Shandandzo was gripping himself. “Oh, they are only knees! You have two of them and an immune system—the body heals, if you leave it alone! You need not shout about it!” He took the headwrap from Rannig’s hand and shoved it into Shandandzo’s mouth. “There. That will quiet you for a while. Don’t you know there are men reading and having their tea? Shameful of you to carry on in this way. The captain only put your knife behind your kneecaps and made a few fractures. Hardly anything to cry about at all. A man has no business crying about kneecaps. A tendon, I grant you, might deserve a paltry yelp or two, but you are alive and you have your health otherwise— you can want nothing else. You hardly need your knees when you are always on the gad, stealing priceless artifacts from visiting dignitaries—and you are a noble besides. Nobles have money: they hardly need feelings or knees. They have men for that.” He snuffed and watched Shandandzo’s eyes roll back in his head. “Now, if you will be a very good convulsing noble, or whatever it is you are, you will be quiet and make no more fuss about your knees.” He turned back toward the teahouse, humphed to himself, and moved to go, but turning back, he said, “And if you make anymore obnoxious noises whilst I am writing my notes, I will have the boy throw you down a well.

I pulled him close, kissing his mouth firmly. Hard. Deep. Devouring and taking everything he had to give. Tears tasted salty on cracked, unforgiving lips. Fingers dug into skin. Nails scrapping flesh. Heavy breaths. Fractured hearts. We were healing. Or trying to. But can two people like us ever truly mend? I gathered his broken pieces and I held them tight. Yoss wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t be able to let go. ~Imogen Connor

If you’re like most people, a string of nerve-racking incidents keeps you in fight-or-flight response—and out of homeostasis—a large part of the time. Maybe the car cutting you off is the only actual life-threatening situation you encounter all day, but the traffic on the way to work, the pressure of preparing for a big presentation, the argument you had with your spouse, the credit-card bill that came in the mail, the crashing of your computer hard drive, and the new gray hair you noticed in the mirror keep the stress hormones circulating in your body on a near-constant basis. Between remembering stressful experiences from the past and anticipating stressful situations coming up in your future, all these repetitive short-term stresses blur together into long-term stress. Welcome to the 21st-century version of living in survival mode. In fight-or-flight mode, life-sustaining energy is mobilized so that the body can either run or fight. But when there isn’t a return to homeostasis (because you keep perceiving a threat), vital energy is lost in the system. You have less energy in your internal environment for cell growth and repair, long-term building projects on a cellular level, and healing when that energy is being channeled elsewhere. The cells shut down, they no longer communicate with one another, and they become “selfish.” It’s not time for routine maintenance (let alone for making improvements); it’s time for defense. It’s every cell for itself, so the collective community of cells working together becomes fractured. The immune and endocrine systems (among others) become weakened as genes in those related cells are compromised when informational signals from outside the cells are turned off. It’s like living in a country where 98 percent of the resources go toward defense, and nothing is left for schools, libraries, road building and repair, communication systems, growing of food, and so on. Roads develop potholes that aren’t fixed. Schools suffer budget cuts, so students wind up learning less. Social welfare programs that took care of the poor and the elderly have to close down. And there’s not enough food to feed the masses. Not surprisingly, then, long-term stress has been linked to anxiety, depression, digestive problems, memory loss, insomnia, hypertension, heart disease, strokes, cancer, ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, colds, flu, aging acceleration, allergies, body pain, chronic fatigue, infertility, impotence, asthma, hormonal issues, skin rashes, hair loss, muscle spasms, and diabetes, to name just a few conditions (all of which, by the way, are the result of epigenetic changes). No organism in nature is designed to withstand the effects of long-term stress.

This is illustrated in the following case. A minister in an industrial section of our city, during the period of severe depression, telephoned me stating that he had just been called to baptize a dying child. The child was not dead although almost constantly in convulsions. He thought the condition was probably nutritional and asked if he could bring the boy to the office immediately. The boy was badly emaciated, had rampant tooth decay, one leg in a cast, a very bad bronchial cough and was in and out of convulsions in rapid succession. His convulsions had been getting worse progressively during the past eight months. His leg had been fractured two or three months previously while walking across the room when he fell in one of his convulsions. No healing had occurred. His diet consisted of white bread and skimmed milk. For mending the fracture the boy needed minerals, calcium, phosphorus and magnesium. His convulsions were due to a low calcium content of the blood. All of these were in the skimmed milk for the butter-fat removed in the cream contains no calcium nor phosphorus, except traces. The program provided was a change from the white flour bread to wheat gruel made from freshly ground wheat and the substitution of whole milk for skimmed milk, with the addition of about a teaspoonful of a very high vitamin butter with each feeding. He was given this meal that evening when he returned to his home. He slept all night without a convulsion. He was fed the same food five times the next day and did not have a convulsion. He proceeded rapidly to regain his health without recurrence of his convulsions.

You can’t heal hurt with hurt. That’s not how it works.

As though he had known what Harmon didn’t know, that lives get knit together like bones, and fractures might not heal.

We have become lonely selves in search of purely personal fulfilment. But that surely must be wrong. Life alone is only half a life. One spent pursuing the satisfaction of desire is less than satisfying and never all we desire. So it is worth reminding ourselves that there is such a thing as ethics, and it belongs to the life we live together and the goods we share – the goods that only exist in virtue of being shared.

You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they will hold you close. To love is to trust, to trust is to have faith. How else are you meant to love?

Alternating Pressure Therapy or Anti-Decubitus Air Mattress & Pump System is used to heal and prevent bedsores, pressure sores, and decubitus ulcers. The alternating pressure system plays a positive role in preventing and curing bed sores caused due to long illness like paralysis, burns, fracture, recovering from an operation or for person who is permanently confined to bed due to old age. An air pump provides sequential inflation and deflation of the air cells throughout the mattress forming an air channel up and down in the mattress to redistribute pressure. Mattress has micro holes which can, via air loss, allow air to pass through and ventilate the patient’s back. The air pump is heavy duty for long life which operates quietly, vibration-free and energy-efficient. The mattress can be placed over top an existing mattress. It is light weight, portable and easy for transportation. It is ideal for use in home healthcare or nursing homes.

Consciousness is a power which undervalues most of us. Typically, even in the most painful moments of crisis, we do not center our inner consciousness or use its real power. That may clarify why "miracle" remedies are greeted with a combination of wonder, skepticism and respect. Yet all have consciousness. Such miracles are perhaps variations to natural ability. If your body mends a fractured bone, why isn't that a miracle? It is definitely complicated, far too difficult for medicine to replicate as a healing process; it requires an incredible number of perfectly synchronized processes, of which medicine recognizes only the major ones and those that are incomplete.

These are the risk factors: chronic depression; eating disorders (anorexia nervosa, bulimia); family history of a first-degree relative with osteoporosis; in men, delayed puberty, diminished libido, erectile dysfunction, low testosterone; in women, late menarche, loss of or irregular menstrual periods, or early menopause (estrogen deficiency); low body weight (less than 127 pounds); maternal history of hip fracture; personal history of fracture related to mild-to-moderate trauma as an adult; poor health; chronic disease of the kidneys, gastrointestinal system, or lungs; sedentary lifestyle; and unhealthy lifestyle (tobacco smoke, excessive alcohol, or poor eating habits).

Secondary Osteoporosis When bone loss occurs from another disease process or is due to a medication, it’s called secondary osteoporosis. There are many genetic, endocrine, autoimmune, neurological, and allergic disorders that cause bone loss, as well as many medications.

Most fractures result from a fall. Muscular weakness and poor balance can turn an electrical cord or the turned-up edge of a rug into a hazard. That’s why the major benefit of exercise as you age is not to add bone density, but to maintain strength, balance, and coordination, and thus decrease your chance of falling.

The three types of bone resorption tests are: N-telopeptide (NTX). This marker measures the small molecules of bone collagen being excreted through the urine. High levels of NTX are associated with rapid bone resorption and low bone mass in both men and women. By testing every several months, it’s easy to monitor and determine the effectiveness of your nutritional therapy. Substantial drops in NTX indicate a reduction in bone loss and less risk for fracture. C-telopeptide (CTX). This is a similar marker to that of NTX, but CTX measures a different part of the collagen molecule. This marker can be tested from either a urine or blood sample. Deoxypyridinoline (DPD). This marker is tested, like NTX, by using a urine sample. Biological and analytical variability can be a problem with bone resorption markers, but

We live on a cursed earth in a cursed universe. Both are under the baleful influence of Satan, who is both “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4), and “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). The devastating effects of the curse and satanic influence will reach a terrifying climax in the events of the Tribulation. Some of the various bowl, trumpet, and seal judgments are demonic, others represent natural phenomena gone wild as God lets loose His wrath. At the culmination of that time of destruction and chaos, Christ returns and sets up His kingdom. During His millennial reign, the effects of the curse will begin to be reversed. The Bible gives us a glimpse of what the restored creation will be like. There will be dramatic changes in the animal world. In Isaiah we learn that The wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little boy will lead them. Also the cow and the bear will graze; their young will lie down together; and the lion will eat straw like the ox. And the nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den. They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain. (Isa. 11:6-9) “The wolf and the lamb shall graze together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox; and dust shall be the serpent’s food. They shall do no evil or harm in all My holy mountain,” says the Lord. (Isa. 65:25) The changes in the animal world will be paralleled by changes in the earth and the solar system: Then the moon will be abashed and the sun ashamed, for the Lord of hosts will reign on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, and His glory will be before His elders. (Isa. 24:23) The light of the moon will be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun will be seven times brighter, like the light of seven days, on the day the Lord binds up the fracture of His people and heals the bruise He has inflicted. (Isa. 30:26) No longer will you have the sun for light by day, nor for brightness will the moon give you light; but you will have the Lord for an everlasting light, and your God for your glory. Your sun will set no more, neither will your moon wane; for you will have the Lord for an everlasting light. (Isa. 60:19-20)

If the voices around you lose their warmth, becoming mere echoes of what once was, and the rhythm of conversation fractures into dissonance, allow yourself to lean into the silence that follows. There, in the stillness, the noise of the world gives way to the gentle cadence of your own heartbeat, a sound that reminds you of your innermost self, waiting patiently to be heard.

I would piece together these broken little pieces over time caused by a monster. And healed by another.

I don’t deserve you. But be fucked if I’m letting you go twice. You promised we’d heal together.

Dmitri, you’re healing.” “And we have the rest of our life to rest. But right now, what I need is that sweet little cunt of yours to remember who it belongs to.

Then after… we heal. Together.

Yes, he is alive. For now,” she revealed and though those last words struck a chord of terror in me, the first ones were enough to heal some of the fractured pieces of my soul. “I cannot say more, for it will shift the hand of fate. Listen closely, darling, you must listen now.” I nodded, my throat clogging up as my father moved nearer to her and the two of them observed me with so much love in their eyes that it hurt to know I had never had a chance to experience it. “You must harness this darkness that lives in you,” Hail said. “You cannot break, and you must never, ever give up. For if you do, all will be lost.” “My magic is gone, how can I fight?” I asked in dismay. “Gone?” Hail rasped, already shaking his head at the impossibility of it. “But how?” “Hush,” Mom cut in. “Do not answer that, Gwendalina. It is not for us to know. Your fates are fragile.

You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know that to love is to be whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they will hold you close.” - Caleb Azumah Nelson

Whether or not it manifests in clinically acute ways, and no matter the cause, the belief that a person is bad, untrustworthy and broken at their core is one of the most destructive things a person can be told or can come to believe. In many faith communities and belief systems this idea of being unworthy is so reinforced that it does not register as foundation-ally destructive or a feature of physiological abuse. Telling people they are broken at their core is a sure way to create people that FEEL they are broken at their core. Feeling bad, wrong or fractured at the core of who we are is a defining feature of spiritual trauma.

Whether or not it manifests in clinically acute ways, and no matter the cause, the belief that a person is bad, untrustworthy and broken at their core is one of the most destructive things a person can be told or can come to believe. In many faith communities and belief systems this idea of being unworthy is so reinforced that it does not register as foundation-ally destructive or a feature of physiological abuse. Telling people they are broken at their core is a sure way to create people that FEEL they are broken at their core. Feeling bad, wrong or fractured at the core of who we are is a defining feature of spiritual trauma.

That something which is unique has its own beauty that can never be destroyed; that it’s always worth mending, even when it’s broken; and that the fractures and the scars become part of the beauty too, making the piece even more remarkable, even more precious.” And then she said, “Heal your heart, Ella. Let Angus help you. Mend your marriage with veins of the purest gold and remake it, better and stronger than before.” And we did. Because, you see, Kendra, I fell in love with your grandfather all over again. Caroline was right: our love was worth mending. In the end, we made the scars part of the beauty of our marriage.

close to his chest. “In the skull we have the bad—and possibly the good,” Golliher said. “The skull exhibits three distinct cranial fractures showing mixed stages of healing. Here is the first.

These people are not immune from wounds – the children fall down or bash their heads on trees, the women burn their fingers tending the fires, there are cuts and scrapes – but so far the injuries have been minor, and easily cured by purring. Crake had worked for years on the purring. Once he’d discovered that the cat family purred at the same frequency as the ultrasound used on bone fractures and skin lesions and were thus equipped with their own self-healing mechanism, he’d turned himself inside out in the attempt to install that feature.

Our ability to communicate our own feelings, and to pick up the feelings of others and thus to heal fractures in connection, threatens the structures of hierarchy. Feelings of empathy and tender compassion for another’s suffering or humanity make it difficult to maintain or justify inequality.

The God of Jesús sato [Jesus the mutt] is creator and healer, one who pours out a healing Spirit …, mending the complex fractures that rend not only their bodies but also their communities.

Our words-backed with action-have the power to heal.

Conditions such as long-term infection, exposure to toxins, food allergies, vitamin D deficiency, abnormal overgrowth of bacteria within the gut, or even constant emotional stress can create undue pressure on the immune system. As you will read in greater depth in chapter 4, this distress leads to chronic low-level inflammation, a major component of many chronic diseases, including osteoporosis.

Chronic inflammation may not shout out and wave a red flag at you. You may have to learn to recognize its presence. Skin sensitivity, irritability, anger, fatigue, depression, general stiffness, nagging joint pain—these were some of my warnings. Start listening to your own. Don’t just pass them off as an unfortunate part of aging. Chronic low-level inflammation is important to recognize—it is key to understanding bone loss—and there’s a lot you can do to diminish its destructive forces.

basic nutritional recommendations for maintaining bone health, 1,200 mg per day of calcium and 800 IU per day of vitamin

If your density is low, you are at greater risk for breaking a bone. Every bone is vulnerable, but those most commonly fractured are the spinal vertebrae, ribs, forearms, and hip bones.

If you’ve experienced either a loss in height or your upper back has curved forward into a hunched position, then it’s important not only to have a DXA scan, but also to be assessed for spinal compression fractures. These fractures can be silent, often causing no discomfort at all, but identifying them is important.

Depending on the circumstances, your doctor may order either a vertebral fracture assessment (VFA) or a regular X-ray evaluation of your spine. A VFA is a separate test performed by a DXA machine and is often obtained along with your BMD examination. A VFA allows your doctor to look for compression fractures in your spine without subjecting you to spinal X-rays, which have two hundred times the radiation and cost four times as much.

Once a broken bone heals, it is often strongest at the point of the fracture. In the same way, God can take the shame of past failures and amazingly redirect their outcomes toward your future success.

A typical 40-year-old will have a bone density of 175 mg/cc. These are strong bones, hard to break and quick to heal if they do. With age, there is about a 2% loss per year. This adds up. By seventy, other things being equal, the density will have sagged to around 105, with is the “fracture threshold.

Every generation has to decide whether it will continue America’s noble experiment in ordered liberty or allow the foundation our ancestors built to fracture. Today we are witnessing cracks forming and spreading, due in part to a president who delights in demonization, who himself embodies an ethic of cruelty and selfishness, and whose corruptions are borderless.

Tragically, her life was slipping by. And yet it was running out in drips, hour by hour, minute by minute. You always had to wait for the sugar to dissolve, for the memory to subside, for the wound to heal, for the boredom to dissipate. A strange fracture between two rhythms. My days are galloping past, but each day I languish.

No, kindness does not lift the weight they carry. It cannot mend every fracture. But it lingers—like lamplight in fog—soft, undemanding, and just steady enough to guide them back to themselves.

No, kindness does not lift the weight they carry. It cannot mend every fracture. But it lingers—like a lighthouse in fog—steady enough to guide them back to themselves. Toward hope. Toward healing.

No no no no,” she murmured, hugging me tight and I couldn’t manage to move to push her away. “I’m so sorry, so so sorry, Xavier.” Her power took root in my body, taking away the pain and healing every fracture and bruise along the way. Clara laid kisses on my cheeks and I grunted as I reached out to press her back. She gazed down at me with a broken look in the depths of her eyes, tears running down her face and making her look almost human.

It took me a while to sort it out, but I realized something sitting there while Jimmy Dill was being killed at Holman prison. After working for more than twenty-five years, I understood that I don't do what I do because it's required or necessary or important. I don't do it because I have no choice. I do it because I'm broken, too. My years struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself. Being close to suffering, death, executions, and cruel punishments didn't just illuminate the brokenness of others; in a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You can't effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression or injustice and not be broken by it. We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn't pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt- and have hurt others- are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world's sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by the things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity... I frequently had conversations with clients who were struggling and despairing over their situations- over the things they'd done, or had been done to them, that had led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lives, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar, if you take something that doesn't belong to you, you are not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. I told myself that evening what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can't otherwise see; you hear things you can't otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us. p289

Though time and distance have chiseled us into strangers, and the architecture of our hearts has been burdened by contracts, pride, and the silent weight of unspoken truths, I stand here not as the son I once was but as a man now forged by love and loss. Father, in the shadow of all our misunderstandings, I have carried you—your lessons, your struggles, your very essence—like cracks in stained glass that do not mar, but illuminate. Today, I say what was left unsaid in the echoing chambers of our shared, fractured world: I love you. And in saying so, I know that even broken trust cannot silence the eternal note of redemption that binds us, for in being your son, I have learned how to find the strength to become myself. And yet, it is because of you that I stand whole.

Writers who see the existential loneliness of man as I see it – as a longing to be dissolved in the subjectivity of God – have written in ways so obscure that I have real doubts whether I can do any better. I am thinking of Kierkegaard, Levinas and Berdyaev, and also of Hegel, in whose shadow they wrote, and whose vision they confirmed by the very vehemence of their attacks on it. Hegel argued that we self-conscious beings become what we essentially are, through a process of conflict and resolution. Self-consciousness is implanted in us as a condition to be realized, and we acquire it through Entäusserung – through building the public arena in which the dialogue between self and other can occur. The self becomes real through the recognition of the other. Language, institutions, laws are the vehicles through which we achieve Selbstbestimmung, the certainty of self, which is also a limiting of self and a recognition of the boundary between self and other. The process that leads me to see myself as other to others also makes me other to myself, and this is the ‘moment’, to use Hegel’s language, of self-alienation, in which subjects become strangers to themselves, bound by external laws, hampered in their freedom and in rebellion against the constraints that press on them from outside. It is in this way that the fatal fracture splits our world – the fracture between subject and object that runs through me. Healing that fracture means reconciling my own view from somewhere with the competing views by which I am surrounded, so that how I am in the eyes of others matches how I am for myself. For Hegel this is achieved objectively through law and institutions, subjectively through art and religion. These are ways in which we re-connect with the world from which our own struggle for freedom and self-knowledge had separated us. Hölderlin expressed some of this in his great invocations of home and homecoming – the journey outwards, which is also a journey back. And Hölderlin’s spiritual journey has been traced in our time, and through a changed emotional geography, by T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets.

After the South’s surrender at Appomattox, the railroad was summoned to unite the North and the South with the West. The bloody attempt to dissolve the Union had failed, and as the new nation looked for a unifying symbol that would move them away from the “total war” that claimed the lives of more than six hundred thousand people, the railroad was heralded for its symbolic value for a fractured nation: it was big, powerful, ordered, and mobile. If the nation was a healing body, then rail lines would become its veins pumping life through its wounded extremities. As William Everdell states in his book The First Moderns, “we call ‘modern’ everything that happened to any . . . culture after it had built its first railroad.” With the introduction of the transcontinental railroad, the United States, still recovering from its self-inflicted wounds, was staking its future to this technology that would be a vehicle of change, solidifying the nation’s standing in the modern world.

And when the rush fades, we are left hollow, staring at the wreckage of who we were. The mirror reveals no rebel, no hero, only a shadow of a self we barely remember. Still, we return. The cycle repeats, not because we do not see the cost, but because the void terrifies us more. Better the burn, than the weight of the fall.

The weight of such a loss was far too bitter to endure. Though I know, within the depths of my soul, they carried a poison that seeped into my very being, an unshakable obligation still stirs within me, binding my heart to theirs, despite all reason.

It is not the nature of mankind to bear such heavy burdens alone.

Hyper-individualism has fractured our communities.

You’re a miracle.” A shudder ran through him. “A miracle in every way. You took a pain that could’ve made you bitter and built it into something beautiful. You let that pain connect you with creatures who didn’t have anyone. And you made their lives better. You healed them. They wouldn’t trust you if they didn’t feel a kinship with you.” “Shiloh—” “It’s true. And you’re a miracle for me, too. You gave me a place to come when I needed escape. You made me feel safe when I rarely feel that way. You taught me so many things before you ever uttered a word.” “Shiloh—” “And you’re doing the same for Aidan and Elliott. You’re giving them an escape. A haven. It’s one of the greatest gifts they’ll ever receive.” Ramsey’s hand slid under my braid and tipped my head back so I met his gaze. There was so much emotion in those eyes, deep pools of feeling you could get lost in forever. “Stop.” “No. You need to hear the truth.” He needed to know the depths of his goodness. How much he gave back to a world that had taken so much from him.

The Brain Song Review (2025): Real Proof After $788 & 181 Days—The Truth That Debunks The Hype (jucm) The Brain Song Review (2025): Unlocking Your Mind's Potential Through Sound? Introduction: Can a Song Really Rewire Your Brain? CLICK HERE TO Visit The Official Website CLICK HERE TO Visit The Official Website CLICK HERE TO Visit The Official Website In today's fast-paced world, many struggle with focus, memory, and mental clarity. The Brain Song, a 17-minute audio track, claims to offer a solution by using engineered sound waves to enhance cognitive function. This revolutionary approach promises to boost brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), reduce brain fog, and improve overall mental performance. But does it live up to the hype? This isn't just another relaxation track. The Brain Song combines theta waves, gamma layering, and specific rhythmic patterns to synchronize your brain's electrical activity, mimicking the brain states associated with peak performance. The Brain Song has generated significant buzz, with viral YouTube reviews, extensive Reddit discussions, and endorsements from neuroscientists. Dr. James Rivers calls it a "daily ritual for the modern brain." People report experiencing sharper memory, reduced stress, and increased learning capabilities after listening for just a few weeks. This in-depth review explores the science, mechanics, user experiences, and potential criticisms of The Brain Song. We'll delve into the history of sound and its impact on the brain to understand how this audio file could potentially redefine how we think. Is The Brain Song a legitimate tool for cognitive enhancement, or just another overhyped product? Let's find out. A Historical Perspective: Sound's Ancient Connection to the Brain The use of sound for healing and cognitive enhancement dates back millennia. Ancient civilizations recognized the power of music and rhythm to influence mental states. * **Mesopotamia (2000 BCE):** Priests used rhythmic hymns to align the soul with cosmic order. * **Ancient Egypt (1550 BCE):** Healers used vocal toning to "expel demons from the head," an early form of sound therapy. In the 20th century, the connection between music and neuroscience became more scientific. * **World War I:** Classical music was used to soothe soldiers suffering from shell shock. * **Mid-1900s:** Composer Olivier Messiaen used dissonance to heal fractured psyches in a Nazi prison camp. * **2007:** Neurologist Oliver Sacks documented patients with amnesia who could still sing entire operas. Dr. James Rivers, the creator of The Brain Song, draws upon this rich history. With a PhD from Stanford's CCRMA, he studied Tibetan singing bowls and Gregorian chants to develop his theta-gamma entrainment technique. "Sound isn't just heard; it's felt in the folds of the cortex," Rivers explains. His song gained popularity after a Reddit post claimed it "cured my post-COVID brain fog in 10 days." The Brain Song builds upon this legacy, combining ancient practices with modern scientific understanding, using EEG scans, BDNF assays, and AI-optimized frequencies. The Science Explained: How Sound Waves Impact Your Brain The Brain Song utilizes brainwave entrainment, a process where external rhythms influence brain activity. Different brainwave frequencies are associated with different mental states: * **Beta (12-30 Hz):** Alertness, stress, and daily activity. * **Alpha (8-12 Hz):** Relaxation and meditation. * **Theta (4-8 Hz):** Creativity and daydreaming. *

The Brain Song Review (2025): Real Proof After $788 & 181 Days—The Truth That Debunks The Hype (z3s) The Brain Song Review (2025): Unlocking Your Mind's Potential Through Sound? Introduction: Can a Song Really Rewire Your Brain? CLICK HERE TO Visit The Official Website CLICK HERE TO Visit The Official Website CLICK HERE TO Visit The Official Website In today's fast-paced world, many struggle with focus, memory, and mental clarity. The Brain Song, a 17-minute audio track, claims to offer a solution by using engineered sound waves to enhance cognitive function. This revolutionary approach promises to boost brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), reduce brain fog, and improve overall mental performance. But does it live up to the hype? This isn't just another relaxation track. The Brain Song combines theta waves, gamma layering, and specific rhythmic patterns to synchronize your brain's electrical activity, mimicking the brain states associated with peak performance. The Brain Song has generated significant buzz, with viral YouTube reviews, extensive Reddit discussions, and endorsements from neuroscientists. Dr. James Rivers calls it a "daily ritual for the modern brain." People report experiencing sharper memory, reduced stress, and increased learning capabilities after listening for just a few weeks. This in-depth review explores the science, mechanics, user experiences, and potential criticisms of The Brain Song. We'll delve into the history of sound and its impact on the brain to understand how this audio file could potentially redefine how we think. Is The Brain Song a legitimate tool for cognitive enhancement, or just another overhyped product? Let's find out. A Historical Perspective: Sound's Ancient Connection to the Brain The use of sound for healing and cognitive enhancement dates back millennia. Ancient civilizations recognized the power of music and rhythm to influence mental states. * **Mesopotamia (2000 BCE):** Priests used rhythmic hymns to align the soul with cosmic order. * **Ancient Egypt (1550 BCE):** Healers used vocal toning to "expel demons from the head," an early form of sound therapy. In the 20th century, the connection between music and neuroscience became more scientific. * **World War I:** Classical music was used to soothe soldiers suffering from shell shock. * **Mid-1900s:** Composer Olivier Messiaen used dissonance to heal fractured psyches in a Nazi prison camp. * **2007:** Neurologist Oliver Sacks documented patients with amnesia who could still sing entire operas. Dr. James Rivers, the creator of The Brain Song, draws upon this rich history. With a PhD from Stanford's CCRMA, he studied Tibetan singing bowls and Gregorian chants to develop his theta-gamma entrainment technique. "Sound isn't just heard; it's felt in the folds of the cortex," Rivers explains. His song gained popularity after a Reddit post claimed it "cured my post-COVID brain fog in 10 days." The Brain Song builds upon this legacy, combining ancient practices with modern scientific understanding, using EEG scans, BDNF assays, and AI-optimized frequencies. The Science Explained: How Sound Waves Impact Your Brain The Brain Song utilizes brainwave entrainment, a process where external rhythms influence brain activity. Different brainwave frequencies are associated with different mental states: * **Beta (12-30 Hz):** Alertness, stress, and daily activity. * **Alpha (8-12 Hz):** Relaxation and meditation. * **Theta (4-8 Hz):** Creativity and daydreaming. *

We all carry fracture lines. They can make us into something rare, unique, and beautiful. If we let them.

The Earthistana Anthem (Sonnet 2570-2574) I was born without lineage, without a holy claim - no prophet in my pocket, no empire to my name. But I rose from the ruins of the borders they drew, and I learned from the ashes what a human can do. The world was carved with lies, with flags of hate and fear - but the pulse of integration kept pulling me near. So I wrote my own scripture with the ink of equality - no one is a stranger, one people are we. Raise your heart like a banner, tear the hatred apart - every life is revolution, every breath is an art. Pilgrims of the heart, children of no throne - the world is our home, the duty is my own. No God above the human, no border in the mind - tolerance is our anthem, we are the humankind. I've seen temples feed on fear, graves labeled as pride - I've seen nations crowned with glory, yet cruelty inside. But I've also seen a stranger share their only bread, and in that tiny gesture, every scripture was said. We are the dawn that we seek, let the dread of dark retire - we are the rebels of empathy, our ammunition nerve fiber. Let the world's wounded pages be rewritten by you - with the ink of courage, with the rainbow of truth. Let us lift the fallen, heal the fractures of fate - every act of kindness, makes tyranny evaporate. From monastery bells to the muezzin's call, from the wailing walls to the city hall, when our voices combine, the soil becomes sacred - the only holy nation is the one without hatred. Pilgrim of the heart, oneness in our vein - love is the revolution, Human is the name. Shortcircuit the convention, surpass all claim to fame - let us enhance, not reduce each other, so the world becomes humane.

The Naskar Paradox (Sonnet that shouldn't exist, 2588-2592) I am the rip in time, that heals the fractures of space. I am the variable of love, that nullifies the constants of hate. To be is not to be, life begins beyond the fate. I am here, I am early, even if you arrive late. When one Naskar dies, a thousand Naskars will rise. Naskar is a madness, signpost of love against lies. Sciences and theologies are my playthings, I'm the pulse before reason and scriptures. If apes pollute the pulse of life with dogma, it is testament of an underdeveloped nature. No telepathy, no clairvoyance, human presence is the miracle. No mind reading, no brainwashing, eagerness unlocks the oracle. The question is the answer, the urgency is the calm. Clocks measure coins, not time; my bruises are my balm. I am beyond your backward singularities, larger than language models and libraries - just a conduit made of stardust, I'm empathy circuits written in verse. Look up from your gypsy tea cups, outside your make believe starcharts, shake off the spell of hollow algorithms, reality speaks through human tears. You hunger for pride, I hunger for life. You hunger for tall walls, I hunger for tall humans. You hunger for future, I hunger for the present. Being is belonging, attachment is advancement. Love is not the absence of pain, but the willingness to face it. I'm every story ever suppressed, every wound that never got stitched. I am not old, I am not young, I'm possibilities unsung. I am paradox made flesh, heartbeat born of cosmic hum. I'm not in sonnets or equations, yet all in me, silly mortal attempts to pen the infinity. You're still searching for unified theories, I'm the memory before divisions crept in.

Kay gathered the fractured pieces of herself not because she was whole, but because she was willing to fight while still healing. She no longer shrank to survive the storm. She became the storm. And she would not stop, would not rest until her children were truly free.