I love sea glass. To me, it is treasure waiting to be discovered, every piece telling a story of a lost bottle or ink well or glass reflector from times gone by. Sea glass can be around in our oceans for decades, and it intrigues me to think of who handled it first and in what form. The glass comes from something now long broken, but how often do we find beauty out of brokenness?
I started musing on this last time, as a little reminder to myself and you, my lovely reader, of the importance of sometimes stopping to notice what is directly under our noses. To sometimes choose to not rush but rest in the richness of detail present now.
Creativity takes many different forms.
I am not good at drawing. Because of this, I believed for a long time that I am not creative.
Other People are creative. Clever, arty types. Both my Nearest-and-Dearest are at art school currently, and the well of my admiration for their artistry and creative skills never runs dry.
It has been a long road for me to unlearn the lie that I am not creative, and to understand that we are ALL creative.
A beautifully drawn picture is of course creative, but so are a high functioning spreadsheet, a magnificent meal, an ordered and systemised drawer, a smart solution to a thorny problem, a healed relationship.
You can read more about my wrong beliefs about my creativity here, and do take a look if you would also label yourself as not creative, because you ARE.
I am incredibly creative – we all are in different ways – but I can’t draw.
What I can do is bring order out of chaos and sea glass is a great example of this.
Beauty out of brokenness.
Sea glass is beautiful. And a single piece comes with a whole backstory that would bring tears to a glass eye if anthropomorphised in a Disney film. It has been battered by the waves and the elements. Tossed around through raging oceans, shattered and battered, cast up eventually on a beach to be discovered.
Its edges have been softened, and oftentimes it can have picked up a scratched patina on the surface from the constant turmoil of contact with stones. Rough edges are smoothed, sharp points softened.
Any of this sound like you and your life?
Multifaceted pieces reflect light in stunning ways that were not possible before.
A single piece can be a gem in and of itself. I have a few bottle stoppers that I keep in a large jar, along with many other interesting and intriguing shapes.
Put them together and something beautiful emerges.
What I love to do is to create pictures using sea glass. There is so much beauty out of brokenness to be gained by arranging individual shattered shards into something new.
Piece them together and a new beautiful whole emerges from apparently broken existing pieces.
I was musing to my very smart big sister recently about why I love making sea glass pictures. She made the connection with jigsaws and decoupage, both of which I also really enjoy and find very absorbing. Bringing together disparate, often non descript or jagged pieces and creating something beautiful that is a new picture but contains all the elements of what was there before – this is my creativity and is a great metaphor for coaching.
Coaching is bringing beauty out of brokenness.
Often clients will come to me with an array of pieces of their lives that are not working as they would like. There is disorder, or a level of chaos, and sometimes a degree of brokenness. I am not a counsellor, and it is important that I am clear about what it is that I do offer. But bringing order out of chaos is a very powerful outcome of coaching.
It might be that there are elements of your life that seem unclear and disjointed. The picture is muddy, or ugly or disatisfying. Many of the elements themselves are beautiful – your values, skills and strengths, life experiences, characteristics. But with all sea glass hauls, there are always pieces that are not kept because they are ugly or do not fit in the new picture.
So too with you. There are likely to be mindsets and belief systems about yourself that are not serving you well. Internal tapes that try to tell you that you can’t, you are not, you will never. Imposter syndrome, people pleasing, comparison, procrastination, diminished self worth.
Ugly, all of them.
And there is no place for them in the beautiful picture we are building of who you REALLY are.
It requires taking the old picture of your life apart – breaking it up into pieces to see what is going on. This allows objective assessment of what stays, and what goes. It also creates space and possibility to line the pieces up in new ways to see patterns that were impenetrable or invisible before.
Order and beauty are restored into something new, but with all the wonderful pieces that are YOU.
Want a piece of this? Looking to bring beauty out of brokenness, to whatever degree, in your own life?
Get in touch for your FREE taster session and we can make something beautiful together.