The Beauty of Broken

We have a garage full of discarded things, that some day will make their way into a garage sale so the story goes from what I have heard from my husband. I commend him for being very creative and hands on at trying to fix things and make and build things himself from shelving, to our deck and greenhouse. I was thinking the other day of how discarded things over time take on a meaning and poetry of themselves. Sort of like some of the people we discard or that discard us, leaving us and them broken in some way, hurt and apparently less appealing, at least for a while. I felt a sudden rush of empathy for our cluttered garage, that was so full of no longer used and functional items I teased my husband about alphabetizing the collection every time he asked me if I knew where a particular recently put in the garage item was. Broken chairs waiting to be mended, discarded, dusty books waiting to be recycled, old shoes that my husband insists will be perfect for working in the yard, old toys, half empty paint canisters, old suitcases that could possibly be patched up. As often as all that clutter annoys me, when I think of all the clutter we as humans carry around in our hearts and souls as so many items we plan to eventually restore and fix, I am discovering I am mellowing my point of view, because we are all " garages " full of unpleasant things along side the things about us that do work efficiently and effectively. I find there is beauty in broken, because it means we were trying hard, perhaps too hard and the strain proved too much. I think children understand this often better than adults. If they love a toy, it does not matter if Bunny is missing an eye or a tail, because they intuitively feel it is still Bunny. It is often the adult that feels compelled to fix the toy, often frustrating the child because Bunny now looks shifty eyed or psychotic as a result of our clumsy attempt to make things as they were. The whole thing is a metaphor for life. We will end up with scars, inside and out, and the worst ones are often hidden, inside of us, like the discarded things we keep away from sight in our garage or attic. But all those discarded items make us who we are, both literally and figuratively. The stuff in the garage is part of our story, part of the story of our children, our house, our yard. The broken stuff inside of us is part of our story as a person. The hurts, the scars, the ugly, the scared, the angry, they are part of what makes us who we are. They make us hopefully kinder, stronger, braver, wiser and as a result more beautiful. We are more beautiful because we are part broken. It brings to mind the practice in the Japanese art of Kintsugi or Kintsukuroi, where you fill the cracks in pottery  with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum, so the broken part may be viewed as enhancing the beauty of the pottery piece. Life will make a mess of things, I have a messy garage to prove it after 25 years in the same busy house. And I have the scars and broken part in my heart to go with them. The gold that holds those scars together are my love for life, my husband ,my son, my friends, my stories, tapestries and poems. They are the beauty in my broken.