I love eggs.
I use them often…
As hand-held emoticons of the soul.
As potent vessels of feeling, healing, and revealing.
As time capsules of my heart’s big events.
They are particularly well shaped for holding grief and/or hope.
Four years ago I had a ‘weeping egg’ season.
While tears poured steadily like oozing lava, I spent one whole sad, sacred afternoon pouring my heart into an egg.
And still it sits, in a special place of care — beautiful, hollow, and precious to me.
Grief objects are like that.
Like placeholders for feelings that would otherwise crush us.
But since then, my egg has hatched into pure happiness many times over.
Objects of hope are like that: they eventually bloom.
Maybe you need an outlet for your sorrows.
Here’s how you can lay/layer your own egg of art/transfiguration.
How to Make a Weeping Egg
(Note: For best results sob freely throughout the activity)
1. Take an egg.
2. Crack it in half.
3. Remove the yolk & white.
(You can cook it up if waste bothers you, or if you’re feeling ceremonious you can bury it)
4. Carefully wash and dry the inside of the egg.
5. If you wish, you can place something inside to symbolize what is hurting.
6. Fit the egg back together and seal with a layer of white glue, modge podge, or paper mache
7. Shred lightweight paper into tiny pieces and write your feelings on the scraps
8. Use the modge podge, white glue, or paper mache to paste your words around it (like you would cover a pinata)
That is it. You have made a Weeping Egg.
Such art will not heal you entirely but, nonetheless, it is an act of ritualistic kindness to yourself — a way to spread mother bird wings over your own fragility.
It may be an intimate, meaningful way to enter into Easter, or mark transition, loss, or prayers for new life.
Slowly nursing the words out…helps.
And the sensory experience of smoothing and caressing choice words over the jagged wound of the eggshell….
somehow
proclaims
the victory of wholeness.
Bless your broken edges.
Bless us all, as we dare to feel and heal.
And bless your lovely eggshell heart.
Happy Easter.
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