Natural Kintsugi
Often, a recurring theme draws my attention to a message the world gently holds for me. I’ve learned to be grateful for those encoded messages, mindful of their relevance and wisdom.
One recent recurrence has been the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi, also known as golden repair. In pottery, kintsugi is the art of repairing broken vessels by highlighting the breakage, rather than by concealing it. Seams of gold are used to reattach the broken shards, making the original vessel glitter with patterns that breakage itself has designed.
Philosophically, kintsugi also applies in healing society, nature, and our own inner souls. Kintsugi is the art of embracing our breakage. Of accepting that our breakage may make us more beautiful, given artful repair and time.
I first experienced kintsugi in my own healing, without yet knowing the word. When cancer struck in my early thirties, the eventual result was a healing profoundly deeper than the mere absence of malignancy. Highlighting cancer’s breakage within me led to a golden healing of old emotional wounds. It brought insight into new paths, including this lifelong path of gratitude for the sheer miracle of existence. It gave me compassion for others suffering parallel pain. It gave me an ability to pass on the healing techniques I learned from my experience. For decades now, cancer’s breakage of me has been a golden, celebrated seam of my repaired life.
I’ve experienced kintsugi in the relationship realm as well, with bonds made stronger after mindfully solved conflicts and challenges, sometimes many years in the making. I’ve seen relationship kintsugi strengthen couples’ marriages; heal conflicts with parents, siblings, friends, neighbors, coworkers. I’ve even seen posthumous healings, when the one remaining finally understands and releases the other from blame. I’ve come to see the emotional practice of kintsugi as an essential skill of love and kindness. In this time of deep societal fractures, kintsugi feels more essential than ever.
This year, I also saw natural kintsugi in the seams of golden wildflowers that newly, profusely filled last year’s wildfire burn area, adjacent to my forest log home. I see now how the fire has also brought us an opportunity to further restore our land, given the flames’ assistance in removing invasive plants and trees. Elsewhere around me, I’ve seen natural kintsugi begin its long repair of other local lands badly cut, burned, or otherwise damaged. None will ever be the same. Yet someday, they will be newly beautifully different.
I find myself meditating on this while looking into the fissures of the earth on the beautiful, volatile geothermal grounds of Yellowstone National Park. Looking into the brilliantly prismatic eyes of the scalding hot pools, I see golden seams of light that parallel those of kintsugi pottery. Yet there is nothing broken. The exquisite beauty and danger of those golden seams make me wonder whether even our concept of breakage and golden repair is too limited. Perhaps our apparent inner breakage isn’t breakage either, but order at a higher level of life than we’re capable of seeing.
I surrender to wonder instead of knowledge, and in this I find comfort. All the volatile vibrancy reminds me that this entire earthly era is a healing from earlier ages of ice, fire, flood, asteroid strikes, other calamity. Even in this tumultuous time, the earth’s power to heal remains profoundly deeper and more patient than our brief, fragile lives can grasp. No matter what breakage and healing comes next, another golden seam of daylight will fill tomorrow’s dawn.