“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in”
- Leonard Cohen, in “Anthem”
My late husband, JLH, deeply loved the artist Leonard Cohen. For him, Cohen comprised a musical Holy Trinity along with Tom Waits and Nick Cave. And this line of Cohen’s about “a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” gave JLH deep comfort, since for much of his life he had felt himself to be broken: broken by his childhood, broken by adversities, broken by his first marriage, broken by depression….
JLH even broke his own heart, and mine too along the way.
Yet my heart, I have found, has great capacity for repair. I practice sound meditations regularly that lighten and strengthen its field. My heart more often sings than sobs. Still, my durable heart will break anew on March 4th this year, as I mark the inevitable return of the date on which JLH died, seven years ago.
Today I enjoy life with my partner AM, whose heart projects an energy that makes me feel cherished. AM is a builder, a constructor, the polar opposite of somebody who dwells on brokenness. A few weeks ago, he took us to visit the Portland Japanese Garden. There, we came across their exhibit on the art of kintsugi1 as practiced by Naoko Fukumaru.
One of the helpful docents wandered over while I stared slack-jawed at the piece of Egyptian art transformed by kintsugi, shown above. She offered up the information that Naoko was born into a family of antiquity dealers. How convenient to grow up surrounded by a plethora of fragile and oft-fragmented objects on which to practice this delicate art of restoration!
Kintsugi as an art form transcends the Japanese culture. Everybody on the planet knows the experience of having a treasured thing break, whether it was the stick you were playing with as a kid at the park, or the favorite mug you liked to use at the office, or the relationship you thought would last a lifetime. The only constant is change, and entropy is an immutable law of nature.
Ah, entropy! We artists and builders, we dreamers and makers, we will fight tooth and nail to thwart you!
As a human, I’m starting to get on in years. This fact regularly surprises me in the variety of its presentation, and sometimes my fragility makes me laugh out loud. Having experienced my share of drops and scrapes and rough handling, I move through the world sporting my own visible lines and scars. Honestly, I wouldn’t know what to make of people who don’t have scars, or who’d claim not to have scars. Scars are a vital part of healing. Scars make us human.
I’m determined to accept the wrinkles and cracks that lie in my future. They are tangible evidence of how my body can sustain itself, how my soul keeps on, how my heart heals itself while ever holding the memory of love’s myriad hurts. For how can we ever know true happiness if we have never known true despair?
Artist’s note: Do you have a favorite scar on your body? Can you trace the scars in your heart? What happens to our consciousness and the world we inhabit when we make the choice to elevate our brokenness to the level of a story, to the level of a piece of art? Tell me a story about how you too are broken and beautifully restored…
Kintsugi is an ancient Japanese art that involves putting broken pottery pieces back together using a binding agent made of lacquer (a resin made of a plant closely related to poison ivy) which is mixed with bright precious metals such as gold, silver, or platinum. The pieces of the broken object are reassembled using a painstaking process that takes months to complete. Once the object is restored, rather than being hidden, its cracks become highlighted by the bright metal.
This is written by an adult. The metaphor of repair is sublime. (Tears on March 4. )Thank you.