Kintsugi Meaning: Joining with gold. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with urushi lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold.
I have seen this several times on the internet, and it’s an incredible way to illustrate the healing journey. A sad part of the human experience is that things break, people too, and sometimes they break so badly it looks like they’re beyond repair and can never be put back together. But if we can draw out some lessons from the Japanese art, we will see that while things break, there can be beauty in the breaking.
When you break, and if you go through life, at some point, you will, on your journey to mending, you must find your gold. Not everyone can be put together the same way; not every scenario requires the same type of gold. This is where you must sit still with all your broken pieces and let them show you what kind of gold you need. This is where you allow yourself to feel the weight of your brokenness as much as possible so that you can gather strength for your mending.
Sometimes the gold you need will be words; other times it could be throwing yourself into your art. It could also be people; allowing them to love you and tend to you and hug you until you feel all your broken pieces coming back together.
Finding your gold requires that you first of all accept that you are broken, and while this feels like a herculean task, it is not weakness; it is the greatest show of strength to acknowledge your brokenness. And after you acknowledge it, you must allow yourself to be mended. You must detach from your broken state. You must realize that a beautiful life awaits you outside this feeling. It is one thing to find your gold; it is another thing to let yourself be rebuilt stronger and better.
Whatever it looks like, I hope that you let it, I hope you let it craft something beautiful out of your mess.
