Kintsugi-Living: Creating Beauty in the Broken Places

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer mixed or dusted with gold, silver, or platinum. Even missing pieces are forged in a precious metal and replaced. In other words, kintsugi highlights the broken places with gold rather than trying to minimize or hide the repairs. The imperfections, the brokenness, is celebrated and the repair makes the original object more beautiful.

Imagine illuminating, on purpose, your imperfections, embracing them with preciousness, and highlighting your struggles for others to see. What a concept. Yet how often do you spend your days trying to hide our brokenness from the world and even from yourself? The energy it takes to bury, ignore, or shame your journey is enormous. It is also dull. It is also a drain on health and wellbeing.

The most interesting, healthy, and uplifting people I have met are those who embrace their struggle, their mistakes, their failures, and highlight them in authenticity. They are comfortable in their own skin. They acknowledge their imperfections through radical acceptance and they seek to create something beautiful from brokenness. Like kintsugi pottery, their presence is illuminating and their lives an inspiring piece of art.

I’m not speaking of famous people. These are lifelong friends, trusted family, my son, and often strangers who I have brief connection with in the grocery store, on a hike, or in an airplane. These fellow humans are so comfortable being exactly who they are—their repairs highlighted in the gold of authenticity—that even a brief connection leaves me inspired and energized.

I recently re-met the concept of kintsugi through the journal, Your Golden Journey, by Diana Christinson. My dear cousin Cathy gifted this book to me, in part as an acknowledgment of our shared history and the broken places we have both spent our lives mending. Cathy and I are cut from the same cloth—no matter what we have faced in our lives we have met the challenges head-on and mended ourselves in all matter of precious metal: laughter, reflection, determination, defeat, energetic positivity, embracing deep pain and deep joy, failure, heart break, healing arts, loving trusted family and friends, and with appreciation of all the tiny bits of beauty that life has offered us along the way.

Yet, revisiting kintsugi is not a coincidence for me. I am aware again of a shattered story mended in countless, deep places—yet I still keep hidden. I wonder if it is time to radically follow the way of kintsugi and let this imperfection illuminate. Can I truly stand in the belief that I am more beautiful for the all golden imperfection and decades of mending?

Perhaps the ultimate kintsugi-life is being broken so many times and repaired so many times, that your being, your essence, transforms into golden illumination—healing light. The repairs so obvious that they become seamless and the light from the precious metal of authenticity is inspiring to the observer. I sit in that question today and wonder…stay tuned.