A Kintsugi Life - the beautiful art of Kintsugi, Mindfulness and Ernest Hemmingway
- Maja Heynecke
- Oct 6, 2017
- 3 min read
I have a fondness for distressed objects. Weathered, worn or rusted, a chip or a crack in a thing has never bothered me much and, to me, doesn’t detract from the beauty. Over the years, I have found some old bruised and scarred porcelain objects, some stapled together, which for me fall into the category of beautiful and deserve to be preserved.
A gift of a stack of broken porcelain, coinciding with a string of personal happenings, lead me to meditate on the Buddhist concept of transience, impermanence and emptiness, and the Western concept of how we treat objects that are broken, chipped or damaged. In my experience, when something is broken, we usually click our tongue in annoyance and throw it away. We are conditioned to think of a chipped or damaged object as being less valuable. Recently, I have begun to study and learn the art of Kintsugi, in the hope of repairing some of the more damaged items and "bringing them back to life".
Kintsugi (Kinstukuroi or Makienaoshi) is the ancient Japanese art of mending broken objects with gold. Traditionally using a mix of rice flour, laquer and gold dust, instead of hiding the cracks, trying to make the repairs ‘invisible’, the cracks are highlighted by the use of gold. The highlighed break is appreciated as being part of the object’s history. The result is a beautiful work of art, the mended Kintsugi piece often being more valuable than the original, unbroken object.
I find the philosophy which underpins it equally beautiful. Based on the concept of Wabi-Sabi, an aesthetic philosophy which originates in Zen Buddhism, Kintsugi is the mindful art of accepting and embracing imperfection. Illustrating transience and impermanence through the subtle highlighting of the unobtrusive, natural beauty in an object.
Wabi comes from the word "wa", meaning tranquility, balance, harmony. Sabi means "the bloom of time." Together, the philosophy means the accepting of beauty brought about by age and wear. To me, Kintsugi embodies the simplicity of mindfulness. The simplicity of accepting an object for what it is, to see beauty in the history of an object, damaged or not, without overlaying judgment or preconceived ideas. What is more radically simple and mindful than that kind of acceptance ?
I wanted this article to be about the metaphor of the practice of Kintsugi, the inevitable traces that life leaves on our minds, and how the philosophy of mindfulness relates.
Sometimes through a severe illness, a major setback, or a sad loss, or something simpler like events brought about through our inevitable ageing, we are faced with the challenge of having to deal with physical difficulties, bruises or cracks - and the complicated emotions those can bring. As with a broken tea bowl, when the cracks show up in our lives, we often tend to hide them, fight them or work hard at achieving the ‘invisible repair’.
It's easy to misuse or make trite the analogy of Kintsugi and healing, but through the practice of Kintsugi and mindfulness, perhaps we can be inspired to see cracks in a different way. Learning to observe our 'bombu nature' and our imperfections whilst sitting in meditation, we learn to appreciate our frailty, our immortality and perhaps find beauty and value in the ‘cracks’.
- “The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the broken places” Ernest Hemmingway.
