On my dog walks, I’ve traveled past a home with a low wall about knee high a number of times, but until recently, I never really saw it. You know how you can see something so often, so many times, yet you don’t really look at it or notice the detail. Maybe it’s because we tend to focus on what’s at eye level and ignore what’s going on below our knees. But on this particular dog walk, I saw the low wall and the workmanship that went into it.

I bent over to see the conglomeration of softball-sized stones held together with some sort of mortar, but what really caught my attention was the blue and yellow pottery shards that adorned the wall. Whoever built this wall didn’t have to include those bright blue and yellow bits, but they chose to make it more beautiful and interesting. And what really strikes me about their effort is that they repurposed something broken. Who knows what happened to these blue and yellow ceramic bowls and plates? In the rush of real life, things are broken, and in my haste, I’m quick to throw them away. Our culture has been characterized as “throw-away,” where we discard anything or anyone that is deemed imperfect in terms of cultural expectations. This wall shows me that even broken pieces don’t need to be trashed, that they can add beauty and make something mundane interesting. It’s a surprise to see those fragments embedded beside the rough, gray stones, and I’m thinking about other broken things, things I thought could never be used again. Disappointments, grief, and loss: maybe they all have a place in a life that is rich and full and multicolored. Maybe they’re the bright blue and yellow bits that can be repurposed into something new.