Beholding the Broken

February feels, Japanese tea bowls, and too much mud

It’s around this time of year that depression rears its monster heads through the floor of my heart, slamming into every defense I’ve nailed down over it.

I’m thrilled to say that January 2024 was one of the best starts to a year I’ve ever had. The practices of starting gently, leaning into reflection, and early morning writing were life-giving. We were wintering, and by golly we had fun.

Butttt now it’s February, and my body and brain would like it to be spring now, please and thank you. (Yes, I realize my petulance: I live in south Mississippi, where winter is mild and spring comes early, and still I’m impatient.) The ice and rain linger on and on—the kinds that leave an ungodly amount of mud in their wake.

So much mud. (And all the parents of rubber-boot-wearing children said amen.)

It feels like the world is dead. And in a sense, I suppose it is.

I hope you have the luxury of grinning at my words and saying, “Come on, it’s not all that serious.” And of course, you’re right, in a way. Life is still silently tenacious in the dead of winter. Birds floof their feathers, tiny boys delight in icicles, little cold fingers curl inside yours as you go inside to bake chocolate things that steam the windows. When the sun does shine, it’s cool and clear, illuminating buds on the trees and the pale green creeping across aforesaid mud. The world is coming back to life, and it’s the reason spring will forever be my favorite season.

But February forces me to face things about myself that I’d rather ignore. The holidays are a joyful blur and January is a cozy beginning, with new notebooks, the smell of Windex and wood polish, and sparkling clean surfaces.

February is just… February. And I’m just me. Still sad sometimes, still anxious, still don’t have life figured out, still writing about the less-than-sparkly side of things.

Here I am, with all my broken bloody parts and shards of grief and hollow fears and nothing to sugarcoat them. And I realize I’m bordering on navel-gazing but I’ll say it anyway—I wonder if everyone else gets as tired of me as I do.

Someone recently sent me a video of Makoto Fujimura speaking at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference in 2023. You’re probably familiar with the ancient Japanese art form of kintsugi—mending broken ceramics with a lacquer technique that repairs the cracks with gold. An artist himself, Fujimura shared how kintsugi dates back to 16th-century Japan.

But the aspect he chose to focus on surprised me. He spoke of how the masters would receive a shattered tea vessel but before beginning the famous process, they would hold onto the fragments without doing anything to them, to respect what had happened. They took their time and studied the fractures.

Some things deserve to be held and noted, not glossed over.

“We have lost this art of beholding. In order to go from lament to glory, we must be able to behold. We have to start from beholding the broken. This is a better story because what kintsugi masters were able to do … is to not just fix it back to the original state (which is often the case in Western industrialized thinking, is it not? We drop an iPhone, we want a new one. Or at the very least we want it fixed so it looks like a new one.)

But kintsugi masters instead highlight the fractures, and using this valuable art form of Japanese lacquer, urushi, they pour and sprinkle gold, accentuating the fractures and making something new out of the brokenness.. and the resulting bowl is even more valuable than the original bowl. The masters cared for brokenness and trauma.”

- Makoto Fujimura

I wonder if times like February force us to behold the splintered parts of ourselves. For growth to come in any relationship—whether with other humans, with God, or with the complicated places in ourselves—we can’t be afraid of the bruised parts on our way to healing.

And on this muddy Tuesday, I’m thankful for mending. What are ceramics anyway, except earthy mud? So perhaps as we behold our brokenness, gold—a symbol of divinity, after all—transforms all. that. mud. I’m thankful that fragments can be renewed. I’m thankful for healing and growing, green life shoving up like a stubborn sprout in springtime.

If you relate to anything I’ve shared here, please don’t ever feel tired of yourself. Because if you’ve had to stare monsters in the face, you are incredible for not giving up. I believe that standing here, loving here, and not giving up despite the tight ache in our chests is fierceness itself.

As we start the trek from winter into spring, maybe we can hold our broken pieces patiently, defiantly, knowing the master craftsman is holding them too.

Hope is here.

Light is here.

Life is here.

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P.S.

I’m considering starting a postscript for the first letter of each month!

Here goes! Things that are giving me life lately:

1. Aggressively Happy by Joy Clarkson, especially chapter two, “Flounder Well”, which includes a Malcolm Guite poem.

2. This Instagram post by Tanner Olson about the ways hope (unlike ceramics) is not fragile

3. A playlist for February mornings

4. The Les Misérables U.S. Tour (!!!) Jaw? Still on floor. Ears? Still full of Nick Cartell’s Bring Him Home. Hugh Jackman could never.

5. Taper candles on my writing desk

6. Reading Fairy Tale by Stephen King (not too scary!)

7. Emily P. Freeman’s Next Right Thing Guided Journal, from whence all these favorite things flow. It’s seasonal. It’s simple. It’s awesome.

8. Even If He Doesn’t by Kristen Lavalley. I’m on her launch team and this book is good stuff, friend. More coming soon! If you preorder now for $13, you get the audiobook today and other gifts like a trauma-informed book club guide. See how to get the bonuses here before it releases on the 20th.

Love ya. Mean it.