The daring edge of disability creates beauty all around us. Painters, poets, musicians. Presidents, speakers, and many movers and shakers. Among these are people living full lives with limitations. Most of us have been touched by disability- the frailty of body or mind at one juncture of our own lives or our loved ones. Without diminishing the grief of living with limitations, we can celebrate the depth of what can be offered in brokenness. There is sharpness in what disability allows a person to see, intuit, and express.
I have been a lifelong lover of Dale Chihuly, the glass artist. At significant junctures I have turned the corner to stand in awe at his glass chandeliers, gaping open mouthed at the shimmer against a window or overhead as glass art on ceilings. Once I turned the corner of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, and knew before I even looked up that something majestic was about to be revealed- yes, an entire radiant ceiling of Chihuly seascape. At a library in Vermont on my honeymoon, I was startled beyond words to stand amidst huge glowing Chihuly shells which served as a harbinger of discovery and learning. Dale Chihuly, through his glass blowing, has sparkled the lives of people all over the world. He has been fearless and furious in his creating, and his art has flourished throughout his life. However, there have always been periods of rest and recovery which have punctuated his flurry of expression. He has lived with bipolar disorder, and knows deeply the importance of pausing and waiting out an episode of illness. He knows what it is like to sink into retreat and into the depths of withdrawal. And then he knows how to emerge again, time and again to resurface and begin- fearlessly- again.
The daring edge of disability is that people with disability know what it is to rise from the ashes repeatedly, with new awareness and echoes in their souls and bodies. They know how to express the beauty of both darkness and dazzle.
This is a limitation which brings with it a precise edge of expansiveness- the ability to bridge the world of the present with a future that dreams into healing and resilience. Only when we confront these edges of limitation can we be fully embodied in our perfectly imperfect lives in these fragile, beautiful bodies- like shimmering glass.
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