Kintsugi for people
Second Time Around
Hello! There are many new readers here and I want to welcome you to Ten Thousand Journeys! This post is one of my personal favorites and if you haven’t seen it before, I hope you will enjoy reading it. And if you remember this from when I wrote it back in the spring, I think you will agree that magic happens in the most everyday settings. Whether you’re reading it for the first time or the second, I’d love to hear what it brings up for you. - Best, Priya
Dear Reader,
To prove that life is an ever-evolving mystery that I have very little hope of understanding, a strange and wonderful thing happened last year. Poet and author Reena Kapoor, who writes Arrivals and Departures, announced via her newsletter that her play was being read by a theater group, and she invited local Substackers to attend. How fantastic, I thought with rising excitement, she lives here! I wasn't sure if I could make it to the event, but I think I left a comment on the Substack post saying I would try my best. Which led to introductory emails and the discovery that Reena lives two streets away from my house. This, of course, was a wonderful surprise, but there’s more.
We met one afternoon towards the end of November. We decided that we would get coffee and go for a walk. I remember being nervous as I walked to Reena's house. I’ve made great friends through 15 years of writing on the internet, but because of the pandemic years, I was out of practice in walking up to a relative stranger and introducing myself. It's going to be fine, I assured myself, as I knocked on Reena's door.
My internet luck held. Reena and I started talking almost immediately as we walked to Starbucks and we continued talking afterward as we circled the neighborhood. We walked for nearly two hours, going round and round, and tracing invisible circles on the roads. We exchanged our first stories and exclaimed over shared interests. We were going to be good friends, I thought, thanking the internet and friendships gods. But, over subsequent meetings, we realized that there was something else even more fascinating happening. We were both writers, but we found we were opposites in almost every other way- temperament, early life experiences, our reactions to these experiences, and subsequent life trajectories. Where one is learning to claim her voice, the other has had practice. Where one was emerging from an intense, decade-long internal journey, the other appeared to be heading that way. I can list all the ways we are different and complementary, but instead, I will share a picture: imagine entering a waiting room at a small out-of-the-way train station late in the evening in the middle of nowhere in the depths of winter. The room is warm, a fire blazing in the fireplace, and you’re glad to have found shelter. There is another traveler there, and as you draw closer to warm yourself by the fire, you get to talking with them. You learn they have arrived from the very destination you want to travel to and you realize they are actually on their way to the valley you have just arrived from. Your paths have intersected in this train station though how the two of you happened to be here at the same time is a mystery. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but you can’t shake off the eerie feeling that something else is at work, some strange magic that can be witnessed but not easily understood. You share your stories with each other, your grief, your hopes, and perhaps, most vitally, you share some medicine that will be useful for the other’s onward journey.
I am fascinated by the image of our lives as overlapping circles. Even when I think I am writing about something else, I am describing these circular journeys widening, shrinking, telescoping, and overlapping, creating a kind of beautiful, magical chaos. The Japanese term kintsugi (which I’ve read means to join with gold) is currently popular in the culture. It is the art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer or gold dust, creating an object whose brokenness contributes to its beauty. I wonder if this kind of meeting someone, holding space for them, being seen by them, and exchanging stories is how we practice kintsugi for people.
I’d love to hear what you think.
Best,
Priya
I feel lucky to have found a fellow-writer/substacker and made a friend who I can talk to about so many topics (including our origins in India) and--this is important--who also conveniently lives in my 'hood :-)
Will see you in the fall, Priya!
I am a fan of both of you, and I like knowing that you are friends.
Kintsugi is one of the most beautiful and philosophically satisfying art forms I know about. It’s such an apt metaphor for people in general. In Alexandra Fuller’s book “Scribbling the Cat,” she takes trip to Mozambique with a former Rhodesian soldier who fought against the black liberation movements who were based in the country during the War for Independence. Fuller, who grew up in Rhodesia and felt the effects of the war, commented at one point how everyone who is somehow touched by war is a broken vessel. It seems many of us could benefit from spiritual kintsugi so that our brokenness can be transformed into something beautiful and treasured.