Life coach and educator Dawna Markova, a Ph.D., gives us Wide Open, a rare book of inspiring lessons from which all of us can learn. Here is her lesson about composting life’s pains and tribulations:

If your purpose is only about you, it has no branches. If it is only about the rest of the world, it has no roots. That is why learning through the wounds in our history, the moments when our essential needs were not met in some very basic ways, are moments that stand still in our memory and moments that hold possibility for you to unfurl your gifts.

Wouldn’t it be a good joke if the worst that has happened to you holds the possibility of bringing the best in you to the community?

We become accustomed to identifying ourselves as nouns–as small, enclosed, exclusive, and local units–artist, friend, mother, victim. We spend so much time close to the canvas, carefully painting tiny purple dots in a Pointillist painting, that we have forgotten how to step back enough to get a sense of the whole. Yet it is only from this distance that we can see the overall patterns we have been creating, the verbs we have been living–creating, mothering, befriending–that are the horizons we need to move forward.

May all of your wounds and broken dreams be salved.

Adapted from Wide Open, by Dawna Markova (Conari Press, 2008).