Kintsugi Again

by James Crews

Kintsugi Again  by James Crews

In the Japanese art of mending ceramics
with powdered gold, no one ever
talks about how they’d leave the pots,
cups, and cracked bowls broken
for a while, sometimes whole generations.
And so I say to you: let your heart stay
shattered in your chest, let it ache.
Some may claim you’ve now been
broken open, and can let in the light.
This might be true, but before you rush
to gloss over the wounds, filling
the holes with gold so they glimmer,
try to find beauty in the broken places too,
proof of where the fire left its marks on you.






From James Crews:

When we find ourselves broken by life or circumstance, others rush in to comfort us, offering what words they can. More than once, well-meaning friends have tried to give me solace in the midst of grief by pointing out that my heart may be broken, but it is also broken open. I feel this is true of any pain we are able to stay with—that it opens us more to love, life, and the whole overwhelming world. Yet I also think that as a culture, we move too fast toward healing, usually before we have even had a chance to sit with our pain, and let it change us as it must.
 
I have been guilty myself of searching so hard for the silver lining in a difficult situation, I ignore the storm that must pass through and do its work. Perhaps that’s why this poem came to me one morning during a long walk in the woods. I like to write in a notebook at my desk before dawn each morning, but the words of this poem insisted on being taken down so much that I had to pull out my phone, stand off to the side, and type it out then and there. I had been thinking about the words of those caring friends, and the way the Japanese practice of kintsugi—fixing the cracks in pottery with powdered gold—has become such a commonplace image for the ways we might love our own scars, seeing them as assets rather than liabilities. I also remembered that a dear friend told me recently that, in the ancient practice of kintsugi, the pieces of pottery were often allowed to stay broken for a long while, even whole generations, before they were finally repaired with gold. 

This begs the question: Can we give ourselves permission to stay in grief or despair for as long as we need to, instead of rushing to fix it, instead of letting others talk us out of the pain we know we need to grow?