Luckily, I am broken. I have been broken for most of my adult life. 
They say your life runs in 3 and 7 year cycles, well I had a 7 year cycle from 15 – 22yrs which broke me three times. Breaks that each irrevocably shattered a chamber of my heart. I have written about a bit of that process HERE (there are three parts the links at the bottom of each post)
I have perhaps been overly protective of the forth chamber ever since. And having glimpsed people who have had the four chamber broken, I am not sure I am brave enough to walk that path.
Instead, much like the art of Kintsugi I have held the cracks and fissures together with gold. Valuing and allowing the beauty of those marks to shine as part of me.
When I run my hand over the past, over the raised scars, it still hurts. Yet that pain has brought with it some of the deepest wisdom and compassion to my character and life. It has given me a personal well to draw on, one that informs my life. And even more so my creativity. Ironically we don’t often write from the lighter happier experiences, more often we write from aches. We reach out into the collective unconscious and find the collective experience of that ache and work with it.
I don’t think I would write what I do without those breaks. I don’t think I would live with so much optimism while still seeing the darkness. The interesting thing is as veterans of these kind of wounds, you empathise with the wounds of others that are different. You can somehow step more readily into their shoes and feel with them their break.
Poets and artists have long known the windfall of damaged souls. This damage propels you into a landscape of shared humanity, of a shared vulnerability. As strange as it sounds, you start to worry the pain will leave and you will be left in a state of numb pleasantness that is the death to creativity.
‘Kintsugi is a Japanese craft that both repairs and beautifies broken objects using gold leaf. By accentuating the break rather than hiding it, kintsugi honors the history of the object.’ more HERE
