Mirror Fable: My Vision of How to Deal with Living in a World that is Broken
It's story time! A fable that explains how our work in the world is connected to our deepest suffering.
I have been thinking of a story which came to me a few years ago. There is so much suffering in the world, and yet it seems like we are each equipped to ease the suffering a little bit in our tiny corners.
I was trying to share this with my graduate students one day—I wanted to affirm their unique callings in the world. And this story just emerged like a vision. I’m sharing here because it reflects the kind of space I’m building with the ✨Joy Club Way✨
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Once upon a time, the world was perfect and whole. In the midst of the world, there was a large, clear lake, so still and deep that it acted like a mirror, reflecting the beauty of the world around it—the tall trees dense with leaves, the crystal clear sky, the grass so green it was almost gold. cartoon image of clear, still lake reflecting the sky and trees above
People lived near the lake and had productive, happy lives, helping each other, enjoying the beauty surrounding them, and living in praise of the goodness they saw each day.
One day, an evil sorcerer came down to this world. He hated the beauty and goodness—it hurt his eyes to see such perfection, so he froze the lake and cast a lightning bolt that shattered its mirrored surface into shards of reflective glass. He then bent everything in the world so that its reflection was no longer beautiful. Lake shattered into glass shards by a lightning bolt
The shards entered every living creature and scattered across the world. The booming sound that had accompanied the lightning caused the people to lose consciousness.
When they awoke, they forgot the world as it used to be and saw the world for what it was now--destroyed, broken, ugly.
Still, deep inside their hearts lived the mirror fragment reflecting a piece of the original goodness of the world. mirror reflecting a withered tree with a crow on the left side and healthy tree on the right
Each person had a unique fragment reflecting one tiny sliver of goodness that used to exist in the world (let’s call it BEFORE). And when they looked around them at their current lives (NOW), the mirror seemed to illuminate a part of their reality that was most discordant with the shard’s original vision. And this made the people’s hearts ache.
Yet they all ached for different things. Some ached when they saw the trees sickly and weak, as their shard reflected an image of the trees’ original health and vitality. Other shards reflected the goodness between parents and children, and ached to see the discord present in many families. Some shards showed human beings in full health, and those with this shard ached at all the diseases and health complications affecting their friends and neighbors. Other shards reflected the excitement of learning, and those with this shard suffered when schools squelched students’ sense of wonder.
With aching hearts, the people gradually began to discover that when they did any small thing to help restore even a tiny fraction of goodness to the world, especially in the area of their deepest pain, the pain caused by the shard in their heart would actually ease for a moment or two. This, though, would lead to greater suffering once the moment ended as they even more clearly saw how their mirror shard’s reflection was so distorted in the NOW times. Still, some brave pioneers began to actively embrace the suffering of their mirror shards as they worked to restore the original vision reflecting in their mirrors. mirror showing a disorted vision of a sickly, leafless tree on one side and a vision of a healthy, green tree on the other
Some of the wisest were the ones with special lenses that reflected others’ shards to them so that they could more directly work on restoring wholeness to that part of their NOW pain. And as they worked and suffered, they found over time that their shard began to burn more brightly--yes, with pain, but also with hope and expectation. And sometimes this would cause other’s shards to light up and reflect more goodness into their NOW.
Over many years, small parts of the world began to reflect a bit more of the time BEFORE. And even if the villagers couldn’t remember the BEFORE times, their mirror shards, their pain, held the resonance of that memory, and they could speak about the tiny sliver of BEFORE reflected in their hearts.
As people gathered together, they started to unravel the story of the perfection of BEFORE, and each day, more and more people joined the work of restoring their world, in tiny, little ways, to reflect the goodness of their mirror shards, creating pockets of love, kindness, and beauty across the whole world.
And this is our task now. To seek the pain in our hearts caused by our particular shards, and the splinters passed down to us as children, and to actively embrace the passion (suffering) therein. To seek to restore wholeness to the little corner of reality we inhabit. And to encourage others to do the same. So that, little by little, our own pain and alienation will ease, and the world will be restored.
What is your mirror shard reflecting?