KINTSUGI: Strong at the Broken Places

Oh my gawd.  Who knew that I would be taking a five-month sabbatical from blogging?  I knew I would have to stop for awhile, but never thought it would be this long.

Little did I know that UN-packing on the other side of the move would take so much longer than the packing ever did.  I moved in late March, and I am still nowhere near ready to call myself settled.

In fact, I can declare myself un-settled.  Very unsettled indeed, on a number of levels.

I am confident that it will all come right in the end, but in this transition things have often felt very broken.  The absence of time to make art has been a major contributor to that.  I still do not have either the space or the time to draw, tangle, or hook/punch rugs.

I've had down days for sure--but I am making progress and once I sort out some of the remaining unpacking challenges, I'll be in good shape. 

​In all of the boxes I've unpacked, I've only noticed three broken items. All of them were much-loved pottery, and two are broken beyond repair.  Last night I set about to try to fix this one:

It's one of my favorite bowls by Nancy Shotola, whose pottery I've been collecting for years now.  When I finished my clumsy repair, it looked like this:

Yup.  Bloody awful.

But you know, it made me think of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing ceramics with gold-infused resin, transforming them into objects even lovelier than they were before.  (It's also referred to as "kintsukuroi.")  hope you'll take a moment to view the photos on that site.

And here is an extraordinarily beautiful song by Peter Mayer about this tradition, called Japanese Bowl.

My own clumsy, non-Kintsugi repair of that bowl meant that when I tested it by filling it with water after the glue had "set" overnight, all the water ran out of the bottom immediately.  Alas.  Unless I can figure out a way to repair-my-repair, I will no longer be able to use the bowl for storing liquids.  But that doesn't mean it can no longer be used, right?

There are life metaphors aplenty here.  Such as, learning to let go.  Or the famous Leonard Cohen quote, "There is crack in everything.  That's how the light gets in."  Or the Hemingway quote from A Farewell to Arms about being strong at the broken places.  

(Although I think the Hemingway quote is usually taken out of context; I'm not sure that, in its original context, it has the meaning we would like to attribute to it!)

Fortunately I have continued to meditate day after day, and that has undoubtedly kept me on a more even keel.   But even with the support of meditation, things have been rocky.  

There is simply no hastening the process of transition.

I have truly wonderful friends nearby.  And much-loved friends from my previous location have also been coming to visit.  I'm thinking of joining a chorus which rehearses only two blocks from here.  And I have found a great studio space that's only a twenty-minute walk, if I can ever find the time to begin doing art again.

Here's a relevant quote from Thomas Wolfe's book, You Can't Go Home Again, which encapsulates much of what I've been pondering:
 "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." 

I've been thinking about the function of nostalgia in our lives.  When is nostalgia useful?  When is nostalgia an obstacle?  

​Here is just one reason I most certainly cannot go back, even if I wished to.  It's a photograph of what's underway in my old apartment.

Renovation is well underway in just about every room.

And that is true for me as well--renovation is definitely underway within my psyche.  It's turning up a lot of grime as I break through old psychological walls and floors.  There are days when I hardly recognize myself.  There are days when almost every single thing I do is a "first time adventure."  (Exhausting)  There are days, hours, minutes, that are dark.  There are storms moving through.  But, there are these days as well (below):

​Whatever the weather, I needed to do this.  

To return to my original analogy about the broken bowls:  I needed to shatter the container of my life and re-form it.  

​I'm at the stage now where things are in pieces and I am just beginning to put them back together.  

​It's disorienting, exciting, upsetting, hard, and comical.  This is a stage requiring a lot of patience.  

I am not patient.

In fact, I am highly proficient at impatience, heavily laced with whining.  

However, I am committed to seeing this through.

As with the art of Kintsugi, If i can mix the gold with the resin here and apply it carefully, then what comes out of this should be even more lovely than what went before.  Perhaps that is the one "art" that I am focusing on right now.

Wish me luck.

Here is a poem by Mollie Grant which says it all:
Kintsugi: the Japanese Art of Golden Repair
(I have not been able to reach her to get permission to print it here so I'm just directing you to her page and you can read the poem there.)

And check out this short post for a wonderful poem by Lisa Cohen on Kintsugi.