The Fractured Self in Fractured Times: A Call for Reunification

“There lies the longing to know and be known by another fully and humanly, and that beneath that there lies a longing, closer to the heart of the matter still, which is the longing to be at long last where you fully belong.”— Frederick Buechner, The Longing for Home

Winter is really here. I can tell because, as I sit on my back porch journaling and sipping coffee, snow has blanketed Longs Peak, thirty miles away in the Rockies. The cold settles in, and I find myself looking in vain for the hummingbirds who, all summer long, came to feed at the orange carpet—the hummingbird trumpets—below the serviceberry just beyond my reach, where they kept me company.

In their absence, in the emptiness of the place they once were, I recall another early morning not so long ago when one hovered close by—its tiny body suspended in the air, wings moving faster than thought, an exquisite balance of stillness and motion. In that moment between wingbeats, life felt both fierce and fragile, as if the whole world were holding its breath.

Watching the now empty, leafless branch, I’m carried back to yet another morning more than a decade ago, standing before the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan. Along the edge of the dark reflecting pool, paper cranes had been placed beside the names of those of Japanese ancestry who were killed that day. They trembled in the wind—symbols of endurance and peace, yes, but also of remembrance. The cranes, like the hummingbird, seemed to defy despair through the sheer persistence of beauty.

Both moments—one rooted in the ordinary grace of a Colorado morning, the other in the consecrated silence of tragedy—speak to the same truth: the longing beneath all longings, what Buechner called the ache to “be at long last where you fully belong.”

In an age as fractured as ours—driven by division, threat, and counter-threat—any semblance of peace can feel as fragile as a hummingbird’s body, as light as a paper crane. And yet, the longing seems deeper now, more insistent. It is both personal and collective, the thread that binds our fragility to our resilience—the shimmer of hope that endures even as the world breaks and remakes itself around us.

The Heart as First Home

Parker J. Palmer once wrote, “The human heart is the first home of democracy.” I think of that line whenever the world feels uninhabitable. What my teacher and friend Parker names is not politics but practice—the discipline of keeping the heart open when everything around us urges closure. If the heart is our first home, then every act of belonging begins there.

The fractures we see around us—political, social, spiritual—are outward reflections of our own inner dislocations. When we exile parts of ourselves—the fearful, the tender, the ashamed—we also exile one another. Healing the world begins not in grand gestures but in the humble, ongoing work of reuniting the self.

Staying Close to the Heart of the Matter

Mary Oliver said that creative work requires “a place apart.” Solitude, rightly held, isn’t withdrawal—it’s return. To stay close to the heart of things is to resist the hardening that masquerades as strength. True strength, I’ve come to believe, lies in staying soft enough to feel everything—the grief and the beauty, the horror and the holiness—without collapsing into despair.

Thomas Merton called contemplation “a spring of living waters.” To live contemplatively is not to flee uncertainty but to bear it—to hover like a hummingbird, suspended between stillness and motion, between clarity and confusion, between what was and what might yet be.

Bearing Uncertainty Together

To be human is to inhabit the in-between. The anxiety that comes with not knowing isn’t a flaw—it’s the price of freedom and a sign of life stirring. What redeems that anxiety is companionship, kinship, and belonging.

Belonging isn’t the absence of pain; it’s the presence of people who help us bear it. As I wrote in Reunion, we are meant to walk through transformation not alone but alongside others who can hold the weight of the unknown with us. A community—what Buddhism calls sangha and Parker calls a circle of trust—is where paradox becomes bearable. In such company, we discover that uncertainty shared is not as frightening as uncertainty faced in isolation.

Reuniting the Disowned Parts

If our times feel divided, it may be because we have divided ourselves. The parts we’ve cast out—the vulnerable, the tender, the afraid—wait patiently for us to return. To be redeemed is to be gathered back together, not scrubbed of imperfection but made whole by it.

Like the rings of a tree, our lives bear witness to every drought and storm. Redemption does not erase those rings; it allows us to read them, to trace their shape with our fingers and our birthright: compassion. Through the humility of self-recognition, we rise toward mercy—for ourselves and for others. This is Buechner’s longing realized: to be known and to know, to belong and bring belonging.

The Elder’s Task

Those of us slip-sliding our way into elderhood are not asked to command the future; we are asked to hold it. The elder tends the hearth, keeps faith with what is yet unseen, and protects the threshold where new life can emerge. Elders redeem.

Merton once wrote, “We are called to be contemplatives, not by withdrawing from the world, but by seeing the world in the light of love.” That feels like the elder’s charge: to see through the fracture to the wholeness still possible, to hold the field steady while others find their way through the dark. Our task is not to preach hope, but to embody it—to stand still enough that others might orient by our calm.

A Call to Redemptive Hope

Despair, I’ve learned, is the refusal to stay in relationship. Hope is the quiet courage to remain connected even when the outcome is uncertain. This elder’s wish is that we reject despair and have the courage to hope.

And sometimes hope returns, not as presence but as memory. In the fading light of evening, I picture the hummingbird again—its small, fierce heart, its impossible wings, shimmering in the air. I think of those paper cranes at the memorial—how they trembled in the wind before lifting, in imagination at least, toward something unseen, calling us to remember, to redeem, that which was lost.

May we live like that—trembling but unbroken, bearing uncertainty with grace. May we stay close to the heart of the matter, where belonging begins. May we welcome hope when it returns. And may we, together, redeem not only ourselves but the best of what we have ever stood for.