Broken
Healing our Broken Relationships with the Japanese Art of Kintsugi
The Great Unravelling within us has begun.
Am I broken? Yes.
Are all people broken? Yes.
Is our natural world broken? Yes.
Can we all be repaired? Yes.
Is this painful? Yes.
Can this process make living better? Yes.
But it won’t happen until we can admit to ourselves that we are broken. The healing cannot begin until we see that the brokenness of the world is simply a reflection of our inner brokenness. Think of people as a Kintsugi vase – Kintsugi being a Japanese technique to purposely break ceramic vases to put them back together to make them even more beautiful. The reality is that all of us suffer trauma in some form as we grow up. We either admit to that trauma and heal it and become better people for it, or, as is usually the case, we deny the trauma, allow it to fester, and we then slowly destroy ourselves and the world around us. How is this related to CACOR’s mission? Clearly I am proposing that broken relationships between people are reflected in our broken relationship with our natural world. If we want to heal the natural world we must also heal our broken inner worlds: our fractured relationships with other people and our traumas. So let’s explore our brokenness and how we can heal from it by first hearing stories from people I know who are suffering from broken family relationships.
Last week I drove to a Franciscan conference in Michigan and on the way stayed with or visited several friends and family members. Every single one of them had family members who had stopped talking with each other. In one case it was two sisters. In another case it was two brothers who would not talk with their sister. In another the kids would not talk with the parents. In another family two brothers who are both living alone have stopped talking. When I returned home it struck me as statistically implausible that every single person I talked with would have such a profound estrangement within their family. So, in passing, I mentioned this to a local friend, and she told me that the same thing was happening in her family. That’s when I thought: “The Great Unravelling” is certainly happening to us as much as it is happening to the world.
You may be asking what is the “The Great Unravelling”? It is a term and an essay which is a particular way of seeing the ecological/social overshoot and collapse we are in the midst of. The paper was published in June 2023 by Post Carbon Institute about navigating the Polycrisis of environmental and social breakdown. The Polycrisis we are now experiencing refers to the tangles of global environmental and social dilemmas that are accumulating, mutually interacting, and worsening. The central claim of this report is that the Polycrisis is evidence that humanity is entering what some have called the Great Unraveling —a time of consequences in which individual impacts are compounding to threaten the very environmental and social systems that support modern human civilization.[2] I will not delve into this because I am sure that as a Club of Rome reader/member this is obvious to you. At issue is what can you and I do about it?
Given the stories of fractured family relationships I described about I think and under rated and do-able action that all of us can is to nurture and heal any social relationships in your life. If there is somebody who have stopped talking with because of a disagreement – find a way to heal that fracture. If there are family members or close friends or neighbours who have stopped talking do what you can to be their friends and even act as a bridge so they can heal the social fracture. This may not save the world, but it will save the part of the world you have been assigned to heal – the world immediately around you and the part you have a chance of impacting. During this Great Unravelling healing in all our thoughts, words and actions is essential. This is not being flaky, it is being totally practical. Our society breeds trauma. Our society breeds isolation. Our society breeds victimhood. Our society breeds breaking relationships between humanity and Nature but equally between person to person. Start where you are. You will often feel you are wasting your time but once in a while you will help somebody. Perhaps more importantly, you will strengthen yourself. You will heal yourself. Being a “healer” also heals you – there is only a win on the path!
Let’s wrap up today with a few ideas on Kintsugi that I think will help you see brokenness in a new light. Kintsugi is aligned with several well-known Japanese beliefs and philosophies. “The first is “wabi-sabi” — the acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, an inevitable part of our world. Wabi-sabi encourages the delight in irregularities and inconsistencies of the human hand, rather than striving for perfection. The Japanese philosophy of “mottainai” regrets squandering and advocates for minimizing waste. The longer the life of our objects, the fewer objects we have to buy that use up precious resources. Kintsugi can make this relationship with breakage one of joy and learning instead of regret and loss. The final concept is “mushin,” a mental flow that frees you from the angst of change and allows you to easily accept fate. Practicing mushin guides us towards a reaction of mildness and quiet acceptance. The power to repair favorite objects with kintsugi helps this mental fortitude, making new life possible. Kintsugi celebrates a break, honoring the story of the object, its ruin and repair. Mistakes and accidents are simply a part of the experience of living. Rather than trying to restore a broken object to its original glory, kintsugi focuses on creating a newly imagined, distinctive vessel. It is not the end of the world if something is not fixable. Sometimes functionality or joy cannot be restored from fragments. Don’t hold on to items that have truly run their course. Simply thank the object for its service and discard the pieces with gratitude. Our scars are what make us uniquely beautiful. By embracing the perfectly imperfect, we can use this beautiful craft to breathe new life into our oldest treasures and practice walking through our daily lives with grace and loving acceptance.” [1]
What can you do? Work to heal the fractures within you. Then to continue your healing help broken relationships you see in people in your life. Realize that we are all broken and this can be OK – IF we help each other heal from our trauma to become, like a Japanese vase, even better than we were before. Then, when we experience the world around unravelling, we can ride the wave, and maybe, just maybe, help to give birth to a new way of life that lives within the limits set to us by Mother Earth, not because we are being “nice”, but because we finally realize that if we don’t – we die.
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