The Strength of Fragile Things

On the Price of Eggs & Finding Hope When the World is On Fire

Eggshells.

I grew up learning how to walk on them. Maybe you did too.

You might even say it is one of my more perfected skill sets. I know how to say the “right” words. I get how the game is played. But at 47, I simply no longer wish to play it.

The thing about eggs is that if they never crack open, all that they hold inside will wither and rot.

You could give an egg, armor created by a team of Ivy-League engineers that protects its shell and sets records for the highest drop.

But that egg would still rot from the inside out if the shell remains unbroken.

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There’s a phrase that keeps rising for me these last few weeks… the strength of fragile things.

Maybe it’s because my surgery got pushed back pending a lung evaluation. And it feels unnervingly fragile, waiting to be tested and told whether my lungs can sustain intubation and sedation.

So, I take the moment I am in, and I do what writers do. I wrap my uncertainty in language and offer it here. That perhaps your uncertainty might feel a little less isolating.

In a world that celebrates Super Bowl champions and superhuman standards of productivity, it’s easy to lose sight of the power found in the places that are, indeed, fragile.

If you’re feeling exposed, overwhelmed, uncertain, and drained in a world that seems like it is burning… well, I’m writing this for all of us.

Eggshells remind me that real strength isn’t about being an impenetrable fortress, but about holding and surrounding the things that matter most with care.

Nurturing, growing, supporting, shielding, incubating dreams, ideas, questions, and new beginnings.

May we find the strength that lives in the tension between that which can be crushed and that which is breaking forth.

The strength of fragile things, found in dandelions that refuse to be defeated, but rise and let go, 10,000 promises scattered to the sky.

We’ve been taught that wholeness is found in our holding it all together. But what if it is found in the breaking apart and setting our dreams free?

May we find the strength of a seed that quietly cracks cement sidewalk ceilings and reaches its roots deep into the darkness beneath.

We’ve been told strength is hardness. That endurance is about armoring up.

What if fragility isn’t a flaw, but the kind of audacious vulnerability that allows us to resist intimidation, bullying and those that want to shape our responses into their own image?

The kind of strength…

That lets one dandelion become a field.

That allows delicate butterfly wings to migrate thousands of miles and traverse continents.

That is found in the ice that forms and melts and sings and breaks and shapes landscapes in its comings and goings.

What if strength is not the absence of fracture, but the willingness to be remade in the midst of it?

And now, a poetry exercise inspired by the style of Wendell Berry, from my journal… ¹

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When I grow weary 
of the weight of a world on fire,
of iron will and stone resolve,
I retreat to silence and solitude;
moss and mycelium, and to the wonder
growing at my feet.

I watch the spider web spun in silver
bend in the wind and remake itself 
once the storm has passed.

Maybe real power can't be contained
in gale and bluster and wind shear—
but in the resilience to outlast and
begin again, again.

I walk where butterflies dance.
Where delicate wings glisten across
miles and endings are turned
into flight.

I welcome the broken bowl
struck through with gold—
it's story now written in cracks and 
seams, molten courage fused in its scars.

And when the world speaks of strength
in soliloquies of stone and steel,
of unbending walls and the wills that build them;
I remember even the smallest flame
will still push back all the darkness
it ever encounters.

And I trust.
Not in the things that cannot break
in the night.
But in what will be remade
in the morning.

— D. Michele Perry, 02/11/25

Take heart friends.

Feeling fragile isn’t a sign of failure or weakness. It’s the invitation into a courageous vulnerability, where greater creativity is waiting to be born.

All my love,

1. Edited to clarify, this journal entry includes a poetry exercise, its style inspired by Wendell Berry.