At our recent retreat, Return to Source, nestled in the snowcapped mountains of Colorado, a 19th Century black and gold Japanese kintsugi tea bowl sat upon our altar. Kintsugi is a Japanese art form featuring broken pottery and translates to "golden repair.” Kintsugi invites us to embrace imperfection and recognize the beauty inherent in repair. Each day on retreat when I bowed slowly to the altar, thanking it for holding our community’s stillness, grief, love, and despair, I acknowledged the significance of the cracked bowl in my everyday life… 8 months after Hurricane Helene cracked my world and changed it forever.
I made it through a near death experience. I lived! Ever so slowly, step by step and with patience for processes that cannot be hurried, my husband and I are rebuilding our lives. Not everyone is given the opportunity of rebuilding after experiencing such devastation. But the crack nevertheless extends throughout every aspect of our existence. In praise to one of my favorite songwriters, Leonard Cohen, “Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. This is how the light gets in.”
Cracks in my once reliable schedule continually surprise me as I travel from place to place as a nomad -- juggling time zones. Cracks arise in the internet connection of temporary offices I set up along the way. Administrative cracks from mail that was oddly sent to an old address leads to an overdue notice. On the material level, any items I found in the rubble of my home are each cracked in their own way.
Spirit has a great sense of humor. My boot and jacket zippers haven’t zipped properly since the hurricane. My laptop breaks down once a month mysteriously. My teeth have become more crooked and there remain mud stains on the surface of a backpack I found in the debris of my home and use daily.
These cracks are symbols of the holes in our lives as we have known it. The holes in the ground we - personally and collectively - once perceived as solid. The holes in systems that are unravelling. The holes in ways and customs the US perceived as fixed. The unconditionally cracked nature of our world collectively is being revealed ever more rapidly through The Great Unravelling.
To the untrained eye, this could be perceived as scary and alarming. But Buddhism teaches that this is our path… following the cracks. Each sacred crack is a teacher, inviting us into a deeper truth.
Meditation reveals to us that Reality is cracked. Ever changing and interdependent. Nothing is fixed nor finished. Light does not exist without shadow. Recognizing this, we see in each crack both emptiness and all possibility. We see our agency to respond to each moment free of a conditioned script. We see each crack - our vulnerability, our fragility, our weakness, our longing, our incongruencies, our paradoxes, our polarities, our messiness, our shadows - as holes invoking healing. It’s not about filling the holes. It’s not about getting to a fixed, enlightened, polished, untarnished destination. It’s about opening our hearts to the space between. It’s about leaning into and meeting each crack with love, being the liquid gold that coats the kintsugi bowl.
Practice invites us to be continually tenderized and made soft in the face of what is hard, to know ourselves undeniably as the wholeness that is nondual and leaves no part out. Our cracks are portals affirming wholeness, rather than proof that we are lacking.
For me, It’s uncomfortable right now. I’m exhausted and need to rest more often than before. I pack, unpack, and misplace things too often. There are so many aspects of the process of recovering from a climate event that require waiting… and waiting longer. And I am one of the lucky ones, supported by privilege and community in my recovery.
But deep inside, I love the discomfort of the cracked bowl. It’s a wildly and vibrantly alive place. I love the reminder to embrace messiness more than ever and not take myself seriously or personally. I love arriving to teach on Zoom in the same clothes I did the week before. I love the questions that replace clarity more and more often, directing me to slow down and spend even more time in not knowing. I love the awkwardness and discomfort of the cracks within conversation or conflict… Just hanging out in the middle of fecund unknown together, being with the messiness of misaligned or divergent perspectives - rather than seeking the boring route of conclusion, finish line, or me versus you.
Meditation is a practice of emptying. As our fixed ideas of self and collective crack open, there is more space for seeing with the heart.
Like the kintsugi bowl, these times invite us to see - with renewed clarity - the beauty in our despair and the opportunity in repair. Everything is broken. Can we let go of superficial concerns or made up standards of perfection and become intimate with reality as it is, together? Can we let go of presentation, polish, or trying to appear a certain way and just be raw and real together? Can we give ourselves to the art of repair together?
This requires showing up empty, open, real, and cracked. This requires letting go of crutches we’ve used to try to hide the cracks, or used to hold on to the false comfort of relative world orientation. Beyond feeding stories of separation, distance, or self-consciousness… beyond the habit of brushing our hair to appear on Zoom… or planning what we are going to say… beyond hiding our age or our weaknesses… beyond continuing to believe the capitalistic notion that we are not enough… we could conserve endless energy and resources by just showing up as we are. The energy that gets freed up in this way of being can then fuel our generosity of service to others.
Let’s revel in the process of what we might create through a culture that celebrates the art of repair. Let's awaken through our longing to be real and embrace messiness... To be seen and see one another as we actually are…cracked and whole simultaeously. Embracing our collective shadow requires that we embrace our personal shadows. If we block or numb out the shadows we cannot hear the call to respond. Let’s melt into all that is broken like gold in the cracks of the broken tea bowl… willing to bring all of life’s broken pieces into radical wholeness.
