Kintsugi

Kintsugi: Beautifying the brokenness with gold

This picture of me matches the mood of my poem... I hope you enjoy it!

An ancient Japanese practice of mending broken ceramic with gold filled resin, kintsugi is an ancient art. Broken ceramic pieces are bonded back together, and the line of repair is decorated with gold.

1. The broken fragments are firmly put back into place

   They don’t always fit together though and sometimes pieces go missing, sometimes we can’t recover what was lost

2. Joints are rubbed with an abrasive such as charcoal until the surface is completely smooth again

   It takes time; it is not a quick fix. Healing isn’t something to snap into, even for ceramic

3. The process repeats many times until lacquer mixed with gold dust is laced on the broken pieces

   The brokenness is mended with gold shining over the places where it fell. A perfectly beautiful scar that wants to be seen, a scar that makes itself known.

4. If the ceramic breaks again the process of kintsugi repeats.

We can see a history of remaking, recreating and remembering what once was.

We’ve all had our falls, our times of shattering

Some of us have learned to staple mouths into smiles and cover up our cracks through cracking up, and I’ve learned that some of the people who seem the happiest are the ones we should worry about the most.

I’m not a ceramic teapot and no matter how many falls I’ll see, putting the pieces back together will never be quick or easy.

I’ll never have gold stitches forever shining over every crack but my scars will always be here.

Since birth, we have been growing from our wounds but since birth, we have been hiding them.

Maybe if our wounds couldn’t be hidden, shame might not show so much.

It’s not all smooth roads and blank slates; we are reshaped, realigned, we can’t escape our falls but we can embrace our histories.

Signs of shattering show strength, they show that you came from somewhere.

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