My childhood bedroom walls were adorned with beautiful china plates carefully curated by the women in my family — my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Kittens, butterflies, and flowers, mainly, watched over my comings and goings well into my adulthood. Gradually, several broke during moves and time and my need to keep them with me as I grew up. In their gifting and their breaking, they are a delight. In their gifting and their breaking, they tell a story. They tell the story of profound love and growth. They tell a story of cherish and change. They tell a story of beauty and brokenness. The plates have been beside me my entire life. They are beside me today, broken in a fancy box under the stairway that leads to our bottom floor — the floor that serves as our office, or what we commonly refer to as “the upside down” (in a nod to Stranger Things.)

I became fascinated with the art of kintsugi years ago. Generally speaking, kintsugi is the art of mending broken china with golden/metallic glue. More broadly, kintsugi — also known as ‘“golden joinery’” or kintsukuroi “golden repair” — is an Eastern philosophy that speaks to finding the beauty in the broken. I am not a kintsugi expert, but the idea that our brokenness is our beauty deeply resonates. Finding beauty in brokenness is freeing. It flips the perfectionist script. It turns “fixing” on its ear. It embraces wholeness from the most vulnerable place imaginable. It says, “You are safe and loved just as you are.”

I have moved a lot, so many things have broken: the plates from my childhood walls, pieces of Hadley Pottery (if you are from Louisville, Kentucky, you know what that means) gifted us at our wedding, a vase from an artist whose name I cannot find. All this is to say, I have several broken pieces — parts of me, my story — that require golden joinery. Golden joinery feels more complex than simply slapping down some golden glue and buying some plate stands. It feels like a process of storytelling and mending the brokenness with gold. It feels like healing from a golden place, like a sunset or the middle of a warm hug. It feels like coming home. Home in all its beauty and brokenness. And I say, golden joinery, holy, holy.

Read this post on Substack and subscribe to the Wide-Awakeness Project