Pieces of Me
Hate being pessimistic? Ok, I invite you to be optimistic with me. :)
SO many moments from my life were moments I once regarded as discarded fragments, or, at best, broken bits I couldn’t quite manage to superglue together. 
Take a step to the left.
My tour guide on my visit to the Washington National Cathedral told so many wonderful stories. She told a bit about the history of stained glass. As she told it, stained glass was originally painted glass fragments, not glass intentionally stained.
The production of glass was originally quite expensive and was very prone to mistakes in the process. A cool breeze through a door or window only half-closed could shatter a pane as it cooled. Since it was so laborious and expensive some enterprising soul stumbled across the notion of taking these broken bits and reassembling them into works of art.
Although in today’s western world, we often think of these works of art as pictoral representations of saints and other Christian themes, one of the (if not the) earliest uses of the medium of colored glass can be found in Islamic art.
Due to certain Islamic prohibitions against “graven images” (some say these prohibitions are not found explicitly within the Qur’an, but are rather the legalistic interpretations of certain religious leaders, particularly those of a fundamentalist or conservative extremist bent), the creations of Islamic artists commented on creation through the use of geometric figures. Mathematians of today includes their geometric tiling under the rubric of tessellation. Something that is tessellated tends to be a geometric tiling on a flat surface that “fills the plane with no overlaps and no gaps.”
The image that follows, from the dome of the Selimiye Mosque in Turkey, is but one example of how Islamic artists choose to represent a view that the power of God (written in Turkey الله and pronounced “Allah”) is so complete, so perfect, that, no matter what has happened, no matter what might happen, in the end God is able to bring everything that shall have happened together with such careful precision that all who gather to see the big picture shall see that nothing was lost, that nothing was wasted. Everything — even those “fragments” perhaps once formerly regretted — shall be seen as having “worked together for good.”
Full sized image: Selimiye_Mosque,_Dome.jpg
Wikipedia entry for the Selimiye Mosque
