First, let me say thank you to everyone who subscribed and is opening this from your inbox. And to everyone who read or shared or commented or texted (or called from Asia)! And especially to everyone who pledged, sight unseen, to actually pay to read this once I figure it out. I am so grateful and love you all.
Now, if y’all listen to Oprah as much as I do, maybe you have heard her talk about how the universe speaks to us in “whispers.” The things that appear in our lives and cause us to say, Hmm, or That’s interesting. What is that trying to tell me? We often know exactly what the whisper is trying to tell us, but we don’t want to hear it yet. So, we ignore it until it gets louder and louder and becomes a scream. (Sort of like me telling my children to turn off the television.) Anyway, what the universe has been whispering to me over the past few weeks, in a very unthreatening, Oh, hi, it’s me, the universe, trying to tell you something, sort of way, is kintsugi. It just keeps popping up.
Kintsugi (pronounced [kent - su -gee]), if you are wondering, is the ancient Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold or other precious metals. The artists use a natural lacquer, urushi, which is extracted from a tree of the same name, to bind the pieces together. This takes time. And patience. And effort. All the things. Then, they dust it with gold, silver or platinum creating beautiful shiny veins that draw attention to the broken places, accentuating the faults rather than restoring the piece to its original condition. The cracks tell the full story.
This is obviously a great metaphor for life because, really, aren’t we all just a bunch of patched together vases running around and trying to pretend we are, I don’t know, some perfect, unbroken marvel straight out of an 18th century dynasty? But, as kintsugi teaches us (and as my dear friend Kate already knew), it’s our imperfections that make us interesting.
The first time kintsugi came up was a few weeks ago. I have been co-teaching a writing class at a local organization that helps women rebuild their lives after experiencing the trauma of trafficking, prostitution, and addiction. Sharing the power of stories, how words have saved me again and again, with these incredible women has in no small part contributed to my desire to write more, and to honor women telling the truth about their lives. Recently, my brilliant and thoughtful co-teacher proposed that we teach a poem called “piecing together after,” by Katherine L. Rosenblum, PhD.
He also proposed that we talk, specifically, about kintsugi, which the poem mentions, and then speak to metaphor more generally.
Great, I thought. Then I read the poem.
Oof. This poem (which unfortunately seems to be behind a paywall at JAMA or I would link here) leveled me with its depiction of the way that cancer shatters a body, and the final lines, “if i could i would piece/this pottery/myself together/with trees and sky and light and/life.”
If I could.
Kintsugi showed up again while re-reading Maggie Smith’s powerful and inventive memoir “Keep Going.” When I read the book the first time a few years ago, it felt so tailor-made for Kate that I actually figured out how to send it to her. (I have a strange block when it comes to mailing just about anything, so this was a decided triumph which Kate duly recognized with ample applause emojis.) The other night, I had the book on my bedside table and opened to a random page—because it’s the kind of book you can read that way—and it said, “The Golden Repair.”
You guessed it, kintsugi.
“The brokenness is not only the most beautiful part,” Smith writes, “but also the strongest part. When I think about healing after loss or trauma, I think of pottery made whole again with gold.”
Smith also explains how kintsugi is related to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, which embraces the imperfect and ephemeral, as well as mushin, which translates to “no mind.” One definition of mushin explains it as “the absence of clinging or being stuck in thought,” which is how I could be sure I have never experienced it.
Kintsugi reached full-on stalker status when it showed up yet again earlier this week, as I was reading Rick Rubin’s luminous meditation on how to make art, “The Creative Act: A Way Of Being.” In his reference to kintsugi, Rubin concludes, “Whatever insecurities we have can be reframed as a guiding force in our creativity.”
Hmm. As I have been thinking about Never Happier and what I hope to do here—less about tangible goals, and more about my overall intention—this whole kintsugi thing seems more than timely.
So maybe the universe, maybe even Kate herself, is telling me to lead with the broken places. To be vulnerable and share what feels less like a single golden vein and more like a veritable golden subway system running across this human facade.
We all know people who hide their flaws and do it well. Like a vase that is broken and glued back together on the inside, the cracks are barely visible. The appearance of perfection is the goal. Exhausting, and, as we know, never the full story. (Also, boring!) Kate, I can tell you, had zero patience for this. Straight to the band-aid. Or what’s the point?
Isn’t that what we love about those Never Happier moments? The collective exhale? The relief of no longer hiding the cracks?
The other night, my older daughter and I were sitting in her closet which she has turned into a reading nook and “earring display.” We were chatting about our days and I started to tell her about kintsugi. She asked a question that had not occurred to me, as children so often do.
“Do they break things on purpose?” she said.
“No, honey,” I said, “I think things inevitably get broken along the way and the point is to celebrate the beauty of that instead of trying to hide it.”
I tucked her in and thought back to class earlier in the day. Toward the end, we gave the women a few minutes to write about what kintsugi meant to them. Their responses were beautiful and heartbreaking and true.
I did the same exercise, alongside them, and was surprised by what I wrote:
When I think about kintsugi, I think about the wounds from my own childhood and how raising my children sometimes feels like the process of mending those broken places. It can be painful sometimes—the extraction of the sap, the blood of my own body and memory—but to see them have something different, something better, is to watch, in real time, as each tiny crack fills with gold.
So, raising a metaphorical glass, here’s to leading with the broken parts and filling the cracks with gold.
Also to imperfection because, as we all are, this newsletter is a work in progress.
This is Never Happier, and I’m glad you’re here.
xx
Liz