Scarred for Life
The Battle Wounds That Mark The Tortuous Beauty Of A Life Fully Lived.
Dear Substackians,
I am assembling a collection of stories about scars. I’ve tentatively titled this compendium “Scarred for Life.” I’ve been collecting scars for decades, primarily on the left side of my meat wagon. They all have their stories. And I am sure that yours do, too. Share them with me (along with a photo if you feel comfortable) at jeffk@onecommune.com or drop it into my Subscriber chat below.
In love, include me,
Jeff
In 1983, when I was 13 years old, I was admitted to the pediatric ward as Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. I had a malignant tumor on my left knee. I was among the fortunate. The entrance of the pediatric ward at Sloan is wider than the exit. While my surgical oncologist excised my tumor with aplomb, he cared little for aesthetics and left me with a gruesome eight-inch scar across the top of my patella.
Forty years later, as I trace it lightly with my index finger, it remains numb. I added another battle wound further up my thigh when I received a total left hip replacement. Isn’t this the course of life? Across the years, we accrue scars – both literal and emotional.
My experience at Sloan was my confirmation, my vision quest, my Bar Mitzvah. I arrived a boy and left a man.
There is a concept in the Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism, called the emanations. The emanations refer to the ten Sefirot, the Platonic forms of wisdom, understanding, mercy, beauty, strength and other creative life forces. These qualities leave the realm of the divine and come to earth in imperfect form.
In attempting to deeply understand concepts like “love,” we reassemble the “shattered mind of God.” It’s as if Platonic capital “L” Love is a pristine crystalline vase hovering somewhere high above the clouds. As it tumbles down through the atmosphere, it refracts and reflects love’s light - only to smack into the world’s hard clay and splinter into a million shards. We earth creatures are left to pick up the pieces. As part of the examined life, in our inexorable search for meaning, we reconstitute God’s shattered mind.
Life is a long journey of getting broken. Most of us are born without flaw. And, slowly, we get burned. Our muscles tear. Our bones get broken along with our hearts. Our telomeres shorten. Our neurons go dark. Our genes hyper-methylate and mis-express. Our cells stop differentiating properly. It’s as if we’re coded to live then die, just as we wake then sleep.
Along the way, we reconstitute ourselves again and again. The British philosopher, Alan Watts, often joked that the opposite of remember wasn’t forget. It was dismembered. We’re all chopped up, and life’s relentless task is to re-member ourselves, to pull ourselves back together and make ourselves whole – to heal.
This project is echoed by the art form in Japanese aesthetics known as kintsugi. Shattered ceramics are reassembled with the use of molten gold to produce the most marvelous creations. In fact, these reconstituted pieces are considered superior in beauty than the originals. You can pick up a bowl or tea caddy and trace your finger delicately across the gilded veins that pull the object back together. In kintsugi, these golden contours are known as precious scars.
In our own re-membering, we, too, display these precious scars. At first glance, we might recoil at the sight of such a disfigurement, but it is these battle wounds that mark the tortuous beauty of a life fully lived.
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Gloria Steinem wrote a moving article about women’s scars. Here’s an excerpt. But many of women’s body scars have a very different context, and thus an emotional power all their own. Stretch marks and Cesarean incisions from giving birth are very different from accident, war, and fight scars. They evoke courage without violence, strength without cruelty, and even so, they’re far more likely to be worn with diffidence than bragging. That gives them a moving, bittersweet power, like seeing a room where a very emotional event in our lives once took place.
Thank you, for such insight and inspiration, Jeff — it made me reflect deeply on my own scars and how Kabbalah has helped me.
It is my understanding that there is a teaching in Kabbalah that the Infinite Light expresses itself through ten channels known as the Sefirot (wisdom, understanding, compassion, strength, beauty, endurance, humility, foundation, and sovereignty).
My understanding is that these are not abstract ideals floating somewhere beyond us. They are living forces woven into reality and into us.
In the Kabbalah says in the beginning of creation, the Divine Light was too intense for the vessels meant to contain it. The vessels shattered — not because “G-D” fractured, but because multiplicity was necessary.
Unity had to be concealed so that freedom, individuality, and consciousness could emerge.
So the shattering did not break “G-D,” because Divine Light is never shattered.
It fractured our perception of wholeness.
Each of us carries fragments — sparks of that original Light embedded within desire, conflict, ego, longing, and relationship.
Therefore the work of a human life is not to repair “G-D,” but to refine our inner vessels so they can hold Light without distortion.
When we struggle to understand love, we are not reconstructing a shattered divine mind. We are repairing our capacity to receive and express love without fear, control, or fragmentation.
By loving consciously, we help realign what feels separate — remembering that at the level of soul, we are one.
When we transform reaction into awareness, selfish desire into shared desire, chaos into alignment — we participate in tikkun, rectification.
The unity was never destroyed.
It was concealed.
And every act of consciousness reveals a little more of what has always been whole.
Our scars are part of the Tikkun - not wounds to hide — they are evidence of our capacity to heal and to repair. And that may be the greatest gift of life. ✨❤️our souls purpose sharing stories as you do now that inspire us to find connections to one another -
Thank you 🙏