Last week I needed to venture in Monroe, WA, to pick up some yarn at Ben Franklin. I am at the end of my 2023 year long knitting project, this time a Sophie Shawl based on precipitation (rainy days vs dry days). I was mostly through November when it was clear I was going to need more blue but I didn’t have another skein so off to the store I was.
Looking to make the drive worth it I decided to visit Al Borlin Park, a walk I used to do frequently when I worked in Monroe for the Head Start program about 7 years ago. I could leave the classroom and get a good half hour in to clear my mind before returning to those precious preschoolers.
I wrote a post in 2016 that featured my saunders there and it is now one of my most popular on the blog, We Are Not Broken. Although I think it is a great piece, its popularity is most likely due to the image I chose when adding it to Pinterest. It has almost 200,000 impressions and 5,000 saves and drives traffic to the post.
The thing I was most interested to see was how the river had continued to shape the park and its trails since my last visit. The Skykomish River snakes next to the park and it not a quiet neighbor. As I wrote in We Are Not Broken, nature is not static nor is it meant to be.
Walking down to the river’s bank, the first thing I noticed was not hard to miss. A massive pile of downed trees was piled up at the shore close to where Woods Creek feeds into the Skykomish.
In fact, as I made my way around it to the water, it was clear that ALL the downed trees were snagged in its girth. Unlike my past visits where trees littered the length of the river, the river was almost devoid of trees except for this monstrous pile.
I could see the snowy peaks of the Cascades off in the distance:
I live in a beautiful place.
But the world doesn’t seem so beautiful right now, especially if you look outside of your own neighborhood. The number of people stuck in poverty and homelessness continues to grow, we have genocide happening in more than a handful of countries and divisions are expanding to chasms that seem impossible to bridge. Like that collection of downed trees along the river, I wonder what the future holds for all of it. Will it continue to grow until it is truly insurmountable or will an outside force come along to dissolve it?
Where exactly is the brokenness and what can we do about it? I still believe what I wrote in my original piece that we (humans) are not broken but exactly what we are supposed to be but that doesn’t always make it easy when you see such broken situations around us. The struggle is with the “outside force”. Is that me? Is that a cause I can support? And what does that look like?
Not long after I wrote that first post, my husband said to me in a moment of frustration that I may not feel broken but he does. He lives deep within his personal trauma and experiences and carries their weight with him. My heart often breaks for him and others who feel the same way.
The feelings I expressed in that post weren’t meant to be Pollyanna, it was meant to offer some hope that the things that happen to us don’t have to define us or keep us from the lives we are meant to live. It also doesn’t mean I don’t have heavy days myself or that I don’t see that darkness that truly exists in our world.
But I do feel we have more agency than we often give ourselves credit for. Whether it is in our neighborhood or afar, we are not stuck with a stuck mentality.
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