Kintsukuroi
Here’s a practice and a concept I hadn’t heard before until the vicar brought it up today in her sermon. You can see why.
Kintsukuroi: When beautiful or beloved objects have been broken, this is a technique of repairing them with gold or silver lacquer, and understanding that they are more beautiful after they’ve been repaired than they were when they were new.
Given that life has a habit of breaking us, many of us must be solid gold by now 🙂
What a lovely idea.
There are items in the museum, roman, medieval and victorian, that have been repaired, often ugly with huge rivets but with great care. I like that. It shows they were cherished.
I wonder what it says when the repairs are ugly, because it’s not as if any of those cultures were incapable of repairing things beautifully. Are they saying ‘look, what a terrible thing it is that this was broken’ or ‘we can’t make anything as beautiful as this today’ – it seems oddly brutal and I’m not sure why.