As we move into the final month of this crazy, crazing year, I've been thinking about kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing cracked pottery with seams of gold, silver, or platinum-dusted lacquer.
Kintsugi, sometimes called "the art of precious scars," is more than just a practical technique for rendering broken objects serviceable again. As a philosophy, kintsugi helps us understand that breakage is part of an object's history, not a flaw to be hidden or disguised. As an aesthetic principle, kintsugi teaches us to find beauty in imperfection. And as a creative practice, kintsugi reminds us where new ideas come from:
There is a crack, a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in.
(Leonard Cohen, "Anthem")
This week, I invited participants in my WriteSPACE Live Writing Studio to freewrite about kintsugi as a metaphor for writing. Here's a sampling of their responses:
Ree (New Zealand): the crack, the way in, the entrance
Vicky (UK): it reminded me of how I work with my source material -- I piece together broken lives in my non-fiction writing
David (Norway): There are cracks in my English, but I work day after day to put the pieces together
Jenny (Australia): Cracks are a break in patterns, broken & beautiful, repaired & patched, patched & whole
Cracks are where the light gets in. They're the place where the waterfall plummets down the mountain in a sculpture carved from an ancient piece of rock:
Every discolouration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent
Seems a water-course or an avalanche...
(William Butler Yeats, "Lapis Lazuli")
I invite you to find the cracks in your own writing -- and then to fill them with light, with words, with rivers of gold.
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