Kintsugi (ENG)

I read in a Facebook friend's New Year's letter about Kintsugi, a Japanese technique for gluing shards together with a visible gold edge. He wrote about glasses that are half full and half empty, and how a broken and glued back together glass is greater (as in: bigger) than a glass that has never been broken, and how beautiful he thinks that is.

What an idea, indeed, to celebrate and display our cracks instead of desperately insisting that nothing is wrong. And would a broken heart be greater than one that has never been broken? It may be more cautious, it may be less accessible, but if you can find your way in through those cracks, it is all the more valuable.

I think of the work on my boyfriends' heart. It wasn't completely glued back together, and certainly not in visible gold. So it makes sense that I hurt myself on the edges of those different pieces. I kept looking for cracks and was sometimes allowed to get closer, and then suddenly not at all.

Where those cracks used to bother me, a year later I am grateful that they are there. (After all, we are all second-hand now, but that makes us so much more certain of what we do and don't want or can handle). Because now I know where I stand, I'm not as naive as I was when I first saw my own heart fall apart, he doesn't expect miracles from me, and I'm already impressed by the fact that he can fry an egg. (even though he uses too many spices), (the bar is set a lot lower after previous relationships).

So I grab my golden pot and paint over all those glue edges. They are the reason we are who we are today, that we find and understand each other and sometimes don't at all, but that's okay too. The holes that are still there, the missing pieces, I like to believe that they help hold things together in someone else's heart. Someone who is close to our hearts, or who lives in the past, and is allowed to nest there. I think of my pieces that live on in different parts of Ghent's city walls and across the ocean. So far from home and yet also at home. Long live the fragility and resilience of human beings.

And those half-empty (cracked or otherwise) glasses, like mine, I place strategically under my rain of thoughts. That way, they can soon overflow and help the ground beneath and beside them to flourish.