Trauma, Crystal and Skulls?

My cracking Kooza coffee mug in 2016

I just finished one of the best books I have read in a long while, a book I never would have read if it wasn't for a pile of synchronicites that led up to me buying a signed copy earlier last year at a book festival, a book called 'The Trauma Cleaner' written by Sarah Krasnostein.
But this post is about a section I read in chapter four of the book, where Sarah wrote,
"She gratefully accepted some of Ailsa's good crystal (offered by her brother Simon), after the mother who repeatedly rejected her passed away.

"I just loved crystal', she said when I asked her why.

For a moment I see the child who grew up admiring the rainbows trapped in the glassware.

"And there was probably something there as well, if you know what I mean ..."

I do know what she means.

It may be accurate to say that I feel it; that something inside me cracks crisply, as it happens sometimes when boiling water is poured into glass.

Just as Sandra keeps the good crystal, I keep a high school graduation ring, engraved 1973, six years before I was born.

It is not in the spirit of fondness that a child who has been abandoned by her mother safeguards the physical traces she left behind.

It is more in the way of self-confirmation: though I may be unlovable, to her, I am not so singularly grotesque as to have sprung fully formed from the ether.

I am rooted just like others in the Order of Things and the Family of People."

As soon as I read that passage my mind went back to the purple cup I bought the day before my birthday in 2016 that had a painted skull on it and that cracked the first time I put hot water into it.
Cirque du Solei, Hermeticism, Kooza and Shamanism

I bought that purple Kooza coffee mug pictured at the top of this post, which would change colour when hot water went into it, and it cracked apart the first time I put hot water into it to watch it change.

I bought it because the skull on the cup reminded me of the bottle of Crystal Head Vodka I bought for Father's Day, which I wrote about in this post -
Crystal Head Vodka, Father's Day and Death
2016 was a weird year for me on an emotional roller-coaster ride of highs and lows.
Even though my father had Alzheimer disease and was in a nursing home, his death from pneumonia just after Father's Day was out of the blue and a bit of a shock to me ... it still is.
I was still dealing with my divorce, my mother's lung cancer and being out of work after a second redundancy in two years.
I hated those jobs anyway and was glad to be out of those places, but I missed some people I worked with as much as I missed my fortnightly pay, although there were people at both places I was glad that I would hopefully never see again in this life, too.
That year was like I was flying on autopilot and that if I stopped to reflect on my troubles my plane would crash badly.
It was only a force that seemed outside of myself that kept me going that year ... and still keeps me going, to be honest.
I like to think of it as something like the Tao, or higher self that seems to know the Way better than I ever could.

Kooza

Looking back at my life, and as good and as bad as it has been, it's hard to think it wasn't destined to turn out that way for some reason I'm yet to figure out.

Sarah Krasnostein and the trauma cleaner

Cheers ... and by the way I threw the cracked cup into the rubbish bin, although I have kept the Crystal Head Vodka bottle and Sarah's book.
I'm not into compulsive hoarding ... yet;-)
Trauma Cleaning and Apart-ments?

UPDATE: 2019

Trauma Cleaning and Art Therapy?