We all come into this world as innocent children. We come in and we inherit wounds, some of us. Others have the wounds inflicted on them at different phases of their existence in the initial stages of life, when they are unable to shield their vulnerabilities. As a result, majority come into adulthood bent, broken; pus ridden, infected, scarred, malformed and twisted humanity.  

Deformed adults. 

Image from http://www.billiebondart.com/kintsugi.html

Deformed, not because they want to be. 

Broken, because someone or a lot of “ones” manhandled them when they were most fragile and didn’t bother to administer any healing balm. 

Entering adulthood from a period of not having agency, the responsibility is not on the child to protect his/herself, it is on other people, and if/when they can’t/won’t, the blame doesn’t fall on the child/teen. Enter the deformed adult on the Life stage……… 

Now, you are wounded, you are deformed, unpretty on the inside, riddled with issues, weighed down, burdened with baggage you didn’t ask for, do not need, do not want. 

Whose responsibility, are you? Yours. 

Adult man, adult woman, it is your responsibility to straighten your broken self, to rid yourself of this baggage, to make sense of the nonsense that you didn’t give yourself.  

Unfair, unjust, but true. 

The world is full of broken people. Some are more broken than others. Looking at Kintsugi, the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold dusted lacquer, I contemplate…….. 

Golden joinery – the simple earthen ware becomes more valuable only after it has been broken. 

 

Golden joinery. 

Joined by gold. 

 

At the end of its life, the broken earthenware is more valuable and distinctive from its counterpart that sits safely and snugly, unbroken. 

Contemplate…………… 

 

To all the broken, make sure you join your pieces with precious material or you might turn out uglier than you were in the beginning, that is the real tragedy. 

 

We must all do kintsukuroi  – to repair/mend with gold. 

This brings to mind a passage from the bible, 2 Corinthians 4:7 “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us.” When you consider this, I think that it is correct to come to the conclusion that those who believe in God and His power to transform are more likely to have golden threads running through their clay, creating beauty from what would otherwise have been disastrous ugliness.