Broke

How many times can something break, before it's broken?

Damaged

Totalled

Irreparable

Beyond Repair

Can broken be beautiful?

There is a Japanese tradition called 'kintsugi' in which broken items are repaired with either gold or silver plating making the object more beautiful and the brokenness becomes part of the object's story and beauty.  Without the brokenness, it wouldn't be beautiful.

While I continue to break, stuff around me breaks and I stay broke, I'm learning to repair the brokenness with something more beautiful. Making my brokenness part of my beauty.  Filling in the cracks with kindness, respect, perspective, gentleness, forgiveness and compassion...for myself and those around me.

Life is amazing and beautiful and hard and joyful and sad and perfect - in equal measure.  There are moments where I feel pure perfection and those moments allow me to escape...to stop thinking...to just be in this moment at this time.  While I'm so incredibly thankful for those moments, I know they are temporary and cannot sustain me.  Conversation, connectedness, compassion...those are the things that are the gold to fill in my cracks.

Collage is an amazing art form that takes pieces of things that seemingly don't belong together and creates something beautiful of the pieces.  My life is much like a collage...a collage of moves, and love and success and failure and passion and humor and people who seemingly don't belong together and yet have helped to form the collage of me.

I'm thankful for the perfect escapes. I'm thankful for the friend who seems to text - out of the blue at the most amazing moments - to say 'you're a beautiful and amazing woman and I love you'.   I'm thankful for the friend who I call to say 'I was thinking about something you said the other day.....' and he says "No one has ever thought of me that way before".  I'm thankful for my family who continues to love in such an unconditional manner that it amazes me.  I'm thankful for my friend who calls me just to tell me she loves me...after more than twenty years, she still loves me.  Those the kinds of connection, compassion and conversation that are the gold in the cracks of my heart.

So I may be broke, but I'm not beyond repair.  My repairs are making me more beautiful as I learn to embrace broken and create a life-collage out of the pieces.