Gold dust
When we installed the beautiful Italian farm sink that I found on Facebook for $100., we cracked the corner as it was dropping into place in the countertop. At the time, there was a lot of cursing and self-reproach, but then I suggested we could “kintsugi it” as a solution. Kintsugi is the Japanese art and practice of mending broken pottery with a bead of urushi lacquer and gold powder. So, after living with our sink hastily patched with blue painter’s tape for the past year, last night I finally decided to mix the imitation Kintsugi consisting of epoxy and gold powder and paste the two corner pieces together.
And after doing the sink, I suddenly had the urge to kintsugi everything. Sitting in bed, looking at the crack between the unfinished wall and wood ceiling I wondered if I could kintsugi the edges of my room. I thought about kintsugi-ing the cracked hearthstone that we haven’t replaced yet, and also the crack in my truck windshield from where it recently collided with a turkey vulture. Kintsugi had become a problem-solving verb with magical limitless potential.
Beyond the physical cracks, I began thinking I’d like to kintsugi the rifts that have formed from the stresses of the year. The sarcastic comments, the grumpy interactions, the teenage moods…. Filling all the icky and negative moments with a glossy bead of golden glue, pulling the sharp edges together and mending their harms and damages.
Furthermore, it would be nice to kintsugi the covid-severed relationships, the drought-cracked soil, the fire-charred and smoke-filled days, I’d like to mend and repair the many damages we’ve endured over the past few years, while also mixing up enough glue and gold for the damages yet to come…just in case.
But then I realized that part of the traditional Japanese practice is not just about mending and saving something that has been damaged, but also about calling attention to the beauty of the cracks. Instead of invisibly fixing the damage, kintsugi’s magic is in showing the crack, making it sparkle. In this story on BBC we are reminded that “In a world that so often prizes youth, perfection and excess, embracing the old and battered may seem strange. But the 15th-Century practice of kintsugi, meaning ‘to join with gold’, is a reminder to stay optimistic when things fall apart and to celebrate the flaws and missteps of life.”
Kintsugi as a metaphor for embracing the old and battered seems like a good philosophy at Crooked House Ranch, especially when so much around us feels, well…crooked. I’m imagining the seams and cracks of our home and lives sparkling with the bedazzled repairs, as a reminder to cherish the effort, time and hope that those cracks embody. The finished product of a completed renovation, productive land, flourishing animals are the Instagram worthy goals that we and those rooting for us are hoping for, but the difficulties along the way are the real stuff of life too, and maybe just as worth celebrating. In our beauty-loving culture, the messiness isn’t always the thing we talk about or share with the world, but it is the stuff that we probably all have most in common.
When we embarked upon this homestead project, we received a lot of encouragement and support and some of that was lovingly wrapped in a sort of “wow, you’re doing it, you’re doing the thing that everyone talks about but nobody actually does”. And with that, came an unacknowledged and self-imposed pressure to really do it well. Not only do we want to make this project work for ourselves, but for all the folks who don’t get to do it. We want to make it worthy of the folks who have to keep working at the job they hate, or the artists who never get to quit their day job and move to the middle of nowhere.
But the reality is that we still have day jobs, we still struggle to pay the bills and get the renovations done, and as I write this, there are mice in our pantry and holes in our floor. So, instead of making some dramatic break from an uninspiring reality we are just muddling along with our cracked life trying to turn it into something special and functional, putting a little gold dust on the cracks to remind ourselves that it is still beautiful.