Life can, and does, break us.
Apart, and open.
It’s a characteristic of being human. We’re all broken: no one gets through life unscathed.
Relationships crack apart, loved ones die, families fracture. Hurts from our past haunt us, warp our present and threaten our future. We make terrible mistakes and deeply hurt, and are hurt by, the ones we love most deeply.
Kintsugi — golden joinery — is the Japanese art of repairing shattered pottery by seaming the broken pieces with lacquer mixed with silver, gold, or platinum powder.
The crack becomes a feature: a platinum joint.
Kintsugi is technique of craft that neatly doubles as philosophy: the broken places, the history of the container and its repair, are not only not hidden, they’re transformed.
What is shattered, is healed. The pottery is richer for its scar, valued for its history.
The broken place expressed in the seaming. Different, but new.
Nothing is hidden. That really resonates with me, this idea that our brokenness is our story, our history. Part of who we are.
And our healing is beautiful: a seam of platinum.
Kintsugi is not an easy process: it takes careful preparation, deep patience, meticulous effort, and — as in everything in this life — the careful application of practice to hone the craft and express the fused vein.
Nothing is hidden.
Your comments are always welcomed and encouraged. We’d love to hear from you.
One more thing.
As a zen priest I’m a student of Tenshin Fletcher Roshi at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center. For more info on Yokoji, please visit www.zmc.org.
I’m also the caretaker of Warwick Zendo, a small in-person and online sangha based in the lower Hudson Valley of New York. if you’d like to check out our practice community, we’re at www.warwickzen.org.
How this works.
I plan to post at least once a week, at minimum. The Freeside will offer those weekly posts, which will always be accessible. Payside will (eventually) offer access to some longer writing and ongoing investigations into practices both literary and zen.
Payside also helps to sustain this project, and this practice. Like any creative project, keep sweeping is a kind of labor, and as such, your support to sustain that labor is much appreciated.
If Payside is not for you, that’s all good. The posts will keep coming on Freeside. The support of your reading and attention is a deeply appreciated gift, and I thank you for being here.
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beautifully needed
beautifully spoken in typed words
thank you….. thank you
In the wake of the election and the nod to ‘Keep Fighting “ , we need this kintsugi vision more than ever. The Bowl is indeed broken, no amount of “fighting” will fix it. A pause, a breath and many conversations about what next, teasing out the many nuances of “fighting” (very small ‘f’).
Perhaps Keep Witnessing might be less retro an encouragement.
Dan Mack