Kin = golden
tsugi = joinery
It means, literally, ‘to join with gold’. In Zen aesthetics, the broken pieces of an accidentally-smashed pot should be carefully picked up, reassembled and then glued together with lacquer inflected with a very luxuriant gold powder. There should be no attempt to disguise the damage, the point is to render the fault-lines beautiful and strong. The precious veins of gold are there to emphasise that breaks have a philosophically-rich merit all of their own.
KINTSUGI
gratefulness is the gold fillings in your cracked porcelain skin recognition of your brokenness– not the brokenness itself– is the beauty in imperfection.
white ripples across your surface become golden seams. the tectonic design is a topographical map of scars and stitches; the adherence of traits that don’t otherwise connect.
“you are beautiful,” he tells you as he kisses each mark softly, his lips tracing a winding path through your gardens.
it is not his words that make it so but they settle just the same reminding you that it’s not the cracks that make you glitter but the gold with which you fill them— forgiveness grace and love.
In an age that worships youth, perfection and the new, the art of kintsugi retains a particular wisdom – as applicable to our own lives as it is to a broken tea cup. The care and love expended on the shattered pots should lend us the confidence to respect what is damaged and scarred, vulnerable and imperfect – starting with ourselves and those around us.
May you find Kintsugi for your heart.
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