THERE’S GOLD IN YOUR CRACK!
This episode is part personal experience and part valuable lesson. After all, our lives are the sum total of our personal experiences and the thoughts, beliefs, and lessons we choose to cultivate from those experiences. This story and lesson begins in 1992 after I had packed up my life and moved to the north side of Chicago, Belmont and Sheffield for those who know that area, and undertook one of my biggest life challenges up to that point: moving into a building that was the world headquarters for one of the largest Aikido and Zen organizations in the world. I moved into what was essentially an inner city Zen monastery in order to study the martial art of Aikido and Zen under a man named Fumio Toyoda. I lived in the basement, along with 4 or 5 other live in students, and my daily life consisted of a variety of grueling physical, mental, and some would say spiritual training regimens and protocols. Several of the mental and spiritual training aspects included learning what we referred to as Aesthetic arts, as opposed to martial arts. These were very old traditional Japanese arts like Sumi-e ink painting, calligraphy, an art called Ikebana, or flower arranging, and a Japanese art called Chanoyu, or the tea ceremony. Although very different in what each art conveyed and required, what all of these arts had in common was an extreme attention to detail, a heavy focus on the mind, body, and spirit being fully immersed in the act and activity, and a strong intention behind every movement and placement. Whether it was a flower or a branch being placed in a particular position within the bowl to recreate a very natural expression of those living things, or the very intentional whisking of the tea powder, everything had a purpose and a reason for its action.
One day while setting up the zendo dining area for a Chanoyu class that would be starting in a few minutes, I was taking the tea set out of the storage cabinets to bring them to the table and, in doing so, I clumsily knocked a stack of rice bowls out of the cabinet and crashing to the floor. These weren’t particularly fancy or expensive bowls, but they were the bowls we used everyday for our meals, our zen retreats, and everyday life. Several of the bowls, as one would expect, exploded into pieces when they hit the floor. A muffled expletive left my face, which I immediately regretted as the teacher of this ancient art was a very old and somewhat frail-ish Japanese woman and standing not 5 feet from me. I was embarrassed and I could feel my anxiety about the situation begin to rise as I imagined my teacher, Mr. Toyoda, coming up here from his basement office and giving me a justifiable beating, even if only a verbal one about awareness, concentration, intentional movement, gracefulness, and whatever other lessons were so obviously present in this very ironic example of my clumsiness. I mean, one of the points of the practice of the tea ceremony is very intentional and graceful movements. I had just demonstrated my complete inability to grasp this concept before the water had even come to a boil.
Nevertheless, the tea ceremony teacher gracefully walked over to where I was frantically picking up the broken pieces of the rice bowls and calmly said, ‘wait, don’t move…just be.’ A bit startled by her comment and not knowing if there was something about to fall off the ceiling and crash down onto my head, I stopped in mid reach and just froze. I didn’t really know what she was instructing me to do so I simply stopped and waited for my next instruction. She came over to where the pieces laid strewn about on the floor and she just stared at them like she was sending her final blessing their way before we would unceremoniously toss the pieces into the trash. What she said next was yet another very foreign idea that seemed very strange to me. She said, ‘just look at the pieces and see them for what they are, parts of a previously whole bowl. Before this moment these bowls were used for good things, maybe bad things, but they were used many thousands of times. They fed people and gave life and nourishment to many.’ She then asked me a question, she said…’are the pieces less valuable because they can no longer hold rice?’ And I was like, ‘yeah! These are pretty much junk now!’ Keep in mind, I was 21 at the time of this incident and had no idea what she was asking me. I was about to learn though…
She slowly started to gather up some of the pieces and was careful to keep the pieces of each bowl with the bowls that they previously belonged to. She took all the pieces of one bowl at a time and placed them in each in a separate cloth napkin that were supposed to be used for the tea ceremony class. She did this with two of the three bowls that broke into pieces. My take away in that moment was only that one of the bowls wasn’t worthy of a cloth napkin funeral because I had no idea what she was doing with the other two. She then said, ‘don’t worry about the accident Blaine, just get the table set for class and we’ll talk about all of this next week.’ I cleaned everything up and carried on with my life for the next week or two and never gave the incident another thought. That is until about two weeks later when Ms. Naskashima came back in for her flower arranging class carrying two bags. She was the teacher of both the Ikebana class, as well as the Chanoyu class and, whenever someone arrived at the dojo, whether for a class or to teach the class, everyone had to follow the same path: you enter the dojo from the street and enter a small atrium area where you check in and take off your shoes. Then you bow as you leave the atrium area and enter into the dojo training area and walk across the back of the Aikido mat to get to the other side where all of the classrooms, offices, living areas, changing rooms, and bathrooms were. It was custom for one of us live-in students to rush across the mat when she arrived and grab her bags from her and then escort her across the back of the mat. This was to protect her from a student carelessly rolling into her, and also simply good manners and an exercise in awareness and service.
I was the lowest on the totem pole at the time so it was usually my job to escort. I faithfully executed my duties that evening, but I noticed she had two canvas bags with supplies instead of the usual one bag. I didn’t think much of it in the moment since she had to bring all of the flower arranging supplies for all of the students each week. I just figured she had some extra stuff this week. We walked upstairs together and had our usual small talk about we were both doing. We rounded the corner and made our way into the kitchen area where the dreaded bowl smashing accident had occurred a few weeks prior. I set her bags on the counter and asked if she needed anything else before class, to which she replied that she was all set. As I was about to leave and head back down to the aikido mat to continue training in the class, she stopped me and said, ‘I have a gift for you!’ I couldn’t possibly imagine what or why she would be giving me a gift but I was curious and excited nonetheless. I gave her the obligatory head nod to one shoulder, the eye roll, and the ‘oh, Sensei, you didn’t have to buy me a gift.’ She then said, ‘I didn’t buy you a gift, I said I have a gift FOR you!’ She reached into one of her bags and pulled out something wrapped in brown paper with masking tape holding it together. She handed it to me and said, ‘go ahead, open it up. I want to teach you something.’ I carefully pulled off the masking tape and unwrapped the brown wrapping paper to reveal the rice bowls that I had carelessly broken a couple weeks prior. They were whole again but had some very noticeable gold colored lines covering all of the very obvious areas where the pieces had been glued back together. Nakashima Sensei had just introduced me to an art form and a philosophy that would change my life from that moment on called Kintsugi.
Kintsugi is a Japanese word that literally means ‘Golden Repair’. Its believed to have started in the 15th century when the 8th Shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimasa, sent his favorite tea cup to China to be repaired. At the time, they would have simply repaired it with Urushi lacquer, as they’ve used for thousands of years prior to that to repair broken pottery. The legend has it that whoever was responsible for the repair knew that the Shogun would not be happy with a traditional unsightly repair and would likely have somebody executed as a result, so they went out on a limb and decided to turn it into art instead. What they did was, instead of a typical repairing of the broken joints, they repaired the bowl using a combination of the traditional lacquer and gold, thus highlighting the cracks instead of trying to hide them. The Shogun was extremely pleased with his now even more favorite tea cup that it became an art from from then on. However, as with most art, there was a purpose behind the method and a philosophy was birthed. The Japanese have, for thousands of years, embraced a philosophy called Wabi Sabi, which is the acceptance of the impermanent, the imperfect, and the incomplete. It’s an idea deeply rooted in Zen and is closely tied to some of the Buddhist beliefs ideas about impermanence of all things, but also a philosophy that celebrates that which shows its age, its use, its aged character, its cracks and flaws, and the wisdom of the journey, so to speak. Instead of celebrating the value of something new and shiny, the celebration contained in the idea of wabi sabi and Kintsugi is a finger pointing directly at the flaws and the cracks as the source of the thing’s value. Instead of shame and embarrassment around our mistakes, our imperfections, and our flaws, none and unknown, Nakashima Sensei opened up for me the world of celebrating our flaws and imperfections as the things that make stronger and more valuable. More specifically, the repair of our cracks and flaws is the thing to be highlighted and shown to the world.
Nakashima Sensei handed me the repaired bowls and, at first, I wasn’t quite sure I knew what I was holding. I knew she had created something amazing, I just didn’t know the lessons that were contained within those bowls I was holding. She shared with me the concept of Kintsugi, the joining of the broken pieces using something very valuable like gold or silver as a way to make the once damaged bowl even stronger and more valuable than when it appeared to be whole and perfect, just prior to its damaged state. This was a huge gift that was being handed to me by this tiny little Japanese flower lady. I’m not referring to the bowls, of course, I’m referring to the gift of the lessons of Kintsugi. She wasn’t giving me the bowls as a gift. The bowls were the property of the zendo and would remain there. She was showing me, not only the importance of not throwing away the lessons of our struggles in life, but more importantly the emphasizing of our flaws and our cracks to the world as a source of strength, pride for having lived, fallen, and gotten back up. The bowls were very useful for serving rice, tea, saki, and whatever else we used them for prior to them being broken. Their value existed in their usefulness and utility for whomever needed them at some time. After they were broken and repaired by Nakashima Sensei, they became infinitely more valuable as vessels that contained vital life lessons. They were now beautiful art pieces that gave tens of thousands of people who walked past them sitting on the altar something to ponder. The flawed and broken bowls went from being mildly useful to a handful of people over the years and worth the $5 it cost to buy them, to being invaluable in their flawed state. They were still useful as rice bowls, if one wanted to use them for that purpose, just as the brick wall that Banksy makes his art on is useful as a wall. But the wall becomes infinitely more valuable for the message that Banksy intends with his art. The bowl became infinitely more valuable because of its flaws and because Nakashima Sensei imbued the bowl with her spirit when she repaired it. She looked at the broken bowl and immediately saw beauty in imperfection and impermanence. I saw only the broken pieces and the loss of the utility of the bowl.
Life can break us. Living itself causes cracks and will rather quickly cause or expose the cracks in all of us. Today there is an emphasis on new, on speed, on tech, on what’s next, and on perfection. I’m not immune to that aspect of life in the 21st century. But, thankfully, Nakashima Sensei gave me one of the greatest gifts one person could give another: the gift of imperfection and the recognition that our value lies not in being perfect, but in the space where our deepest life lessons reveal our flaws and imperfections that make us who we are. The places where we’ve been broken but the broken pieces are joined with gold making us stronger and more valuable than before. Embrace your miles my friends. Embrace your wrinkles and flaws. Embrace the once broken parts of you that have lead to knowing and wisdom. Ernest Hemingway said, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. This is from A Farewell to Arms and taken from a larger context. I don’t think Hemingway knew anything of Kintsugi and the art of gold joinery and repair, but he knew that we have the ability to be stronger at the places where we were once broken.
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