After the Fall
by H.Dumpty and Janet Coster
He doesn’t remember the moment he cracked and all of the ensuing chaos — only the quiet afterward.
No more cavalry, no more glue. Just the soft tick of sunlight on grass and the realization that he was still here. Not the same but not gone.
This isn’t a story about putting things back the way they were.
It’s about learning to sit gently with the pieces — and maybe even, someday, letting the wind carry some of them away.
Wholeness, it turns out, isn’t always what we thought it was.
After the Fall
by H. Dumpty
We grow up with the idea that to be whole means to be unbroken — smooth-edged, seamless, intact. In our stories, the hero returns home essentially unscarred, the family is reunited, the kingdom restored. Brokenness, and cracks are just things to hide, mend, or forget.
But what if – wholeness isn’t a return to how things were?
What if – it's not the absence of damage, but the presence of something deeper — truth, resilience, wisdom?
After the fall, there’s a strange quiet. At first, it feels like failure. Like something vital has been lost. But over time, if you stay with it — if you don’t rush to fix or flee — something else arrives. Perspective. A kind of listening. Even grace.
Wholeness, it turns out, may include the break. May even require it.
A cracked shell lets in the air. The light. It makes you feel the world more directly — sometimes painfully so. But also, more truthfully. You can stop pretending to be unshaken. You can stop holding your breath.
What if the goal isn’t to get back to the wall, but to go on tumbling forward — as you are — into something less perfect and more alive?
That’s where I am now. Not restored. Not the way I was.
But here. Present. A little cracked. Entirely real.
~ H. Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty
By Janet Coster
Doors and windows are walls that move.
And what if
it wasn’t so much that
Humpty lost his balance
and took a great fall,
what if
it was the very wall beneath
that gave way –
a door, a window heaving wide
cleaving perfect cosmos – an egg –
celestial sphere from which all life flows,
shattering that shell
splattering contents
fully mingling with life
the once unbroken contents
of that grand soul,
pouring out richness, until
so staggering the hemorrhage,
human tools that race to
bind, fasten, secure and mend,
would not avail,
and nothing could be said,
or done, or heard … except
the sonorous sound of
hearty laughter inside
what used to be called wall –
divine jolt
that all the king’s horses,
and all the king’s men,
will not withstand. For even
the greatest in the land – the high,
the mighty, power brokers, the fixers,
cannot hold back an outpouring
that never shall return
to any semblance of original shape.So.
Next time things begin to quake,
and fears threaten to overtake,
think of old Humpty becoming unyolked –
forever freed from stale outlooks
formed on high, atop old ramparts
of isolation.
And let us not cry for him who
(though he did not know it)
was ready for The Fall – the grace,
the break with paradise
that sealed him in simplicity,
protecting him from ambiguity –
who was ready for the same tumble
that broke Jack’s crown,
when he, too, felt the divine thump,
the knock on the head that led to falling
down down down down
into merciful mercilessness of divine abyss,
where all tragedy,
all trauma,
all jaggedy jigsaw puzzle pieces
of life‘s shell topple together –
cracking,
careening,
creating eternal hazards
spilling toward emptiness,
toward new skins without shells,
new shapes without shackles,
new worlds with no walls at all.