Broken: how we pick up the pieces
About 6 or 7 years ago, I got really into making pottery. I don’t mean I went to those places where you paint a mug or a dog bowl with glaze and they fire it for you. I mean the thing where you get really dirty because you’re throwing clay on a wheel, and you feel all primal and awesome because you made a thing with your hands. A local high school has a pottery studio, so I would go in the evenings, walking by the endless rows of lockers and past the gym that smelled like teenaged sweat and angst and longing, and I’d make my way to the studio for my beginner pottery class.
Like everyone else who saw Ghost, I thought a pottery wheel seemed pretty sexy. In reality, there was nothing sexy about me with the wheel. Mostly it was just really messy and involved me keeping my introverted head down so I didn’t have to talk to any of the other students, who seemed to be mostly divorced women looking to reinvent themselves as sexy potters because they also saw Ghost. My pottery was never very good, it was really clunky and crooked and I always had a hard time picking out the right glaze, but I adored the creative process of it.
Eventually, just out of the sheer volume of cups/bowls/vases/toothbrush holders I created, I managed to make a couple of things that were not terrible. One of these not-terrible things was a yarn bowl. (Unsurprisingly, that is a bowl that holds a yarn, and it has a small slit in the side where you thread the yarn through so your knitting doesn’t get tangled.) The color fired beautifully, and it was almost symmetrical.
I’ve kept that bowl on my office bookshelf ever since, and it makes me happy whenever I notice it. I made something beautiful.
Last week, that bowl got knocked off the bookcase and it smashed into four jagged chunks.
It physically hurt. I had put hours of work into that bowl, it brought me such joy, and suddenly it was a pile of shattered shards.
Once I picked up the pieces - and my heart - off the floor, I was able to salvage most of it and got to work with some Gorilla Glue. But there was one shard that had been crushed so much that it was impossible to save. So while mostly the bowl got pieced back together, that chip will be there forever.
Yarn bowl - put back together. The white chip in the back couldn’t be repaired
I’ve heard that in Japan, they will sometimes repair broken pottery with gold. The broken part is seen as a unique piece of the history of the bowl, which adds to its beauty.
It’s even stronger in the places where it was repaired.
It has a story now.
It has survived.
Many of us are feeling shattered these days. There might be pieces of us all over the floor and we’re wondering how we’re ever going to put them all back together.
And the truth is, I don’t totally know how we do that - but I think we do it piece by piece. For some of us, there might always be that a piece that is missing, that one place where we remain raw and ragged. But that doesn’t mean we are no longer beautiful. In fact, we’re stronger in the places where we put ourselves back together.
We survived.