Growing Creative Podcast
Growing Creative Podcast
Episode 2: Beauty & Brokenness
08/24/21
The Growing Creative Podcast
S1E2: Beauty & Brokenness
In today's episode, Jane explores the Japanese art of Kintsugi gold mending, the philosophy of Wabi-Sabi, & how our consumeristic mindset harms our view of brokenness.
Resource Links:
- Kon Mari Wabi-Sabi Kintsugi Repair Kit
See the full transcript of this episode here.
Jane Boutwell is an artist & creative coach based in Atlanta, Georgia. She loves to nurture and empower others to pursue their creative callings.
"I am an artist with an inquisitive mind, a heart connected to nature and a soul yearning towards God…a child of dirt and dance…a beauty bringing blessing writer… a poetic painter and potter.
Starting with mud pies as a child in the backyard, my creativity includes tactile, intuitive, and deeply-in-touch-with-nature ways of being in the world. I see myself as an apprentice in God’s art studio of the natural world that is full of metaphor, imprinted with the character of the Maker.
It is my passion to share the shimmering beauty and deep truths I find in the creative medium that seems most fitting. Those creative expressions include gardening, quilting, writing, painting, sketching, ceramics, dancing, creative coaching, podcasting, and family life with my husband and four children in Tucker/Atlanta, Georgia."
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You're listening to the Growing Creative Podcast. And I'm your host Jane Boutwell, I'm an artist and a creative coach. This is a space that will nurture your heart and empower you to pursue your creative calling, whatever that means.
Today, we're going to talk about beauty and brokenness. I'm sure I'll revisit this theme at some point, because it's something that I find to have many, many applications, and it's been an underlying theme in my work for my whole life. But one of the things I want to use today, as we talk about beauty and brokenness is a beautiful metaphor of the Japanese art of Kintsugi. That's K I N T S U G I, if you want to look that up.
If you haven't heard of it, it is the art of gold mending, where in Japan, instead of saying up this, you know, treasure of porcelain or ceramics is broken, we're going to throw it away. As our consumer American culture tells us, you know, everything we have was made in a factory, it's replaceable, it's broken. Now we toss it. It gives us this idea that when there's broken parts of ourselves, it means we're no good. And we're destined for destruction and the doom of being cast aside. But when we embrace this mending, I think any kind of mending taking something that has holes from where, and been used many times, you know, taking the time and care to stitch that back up, but especially the Japanese gold mending, where you take rosin and you explore all the heartbroken parts of this thing and apply this rosin to bind it back together.
And then this gold dust on top, I'm going to talk some more about that as we continue. But first I want to ask the question, why is beauty and brokenness and this concept of holding both of them together, something that's revolutionary and not easy for us to do. Our brains are just so programmed to simplify things. We tend to categorize things as good or bad.
If you talk to two children from the same family, perhaps it was a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic parent. One child might remember all the good times and their brain just couldn't hold the complication of somebody being good and bad. So it just remembered the good and tossed out the bad. And then another child from that same family might say, no, our childhood was traumatic and this terrible thing happened.
This was all bad. They couldn't even remember the good memories because their brain just simply couldn't bear the complexity of that tension that someone could be good and bad that the family experience could have good and bad in it. Another thing about our brain is that we're wired to remember traumatic or difficult negative experiences. I think this is sad. I'm sure it's something that's key to our,
you know, survival and safety. If something happens quickly, but it's very detrimental to our health and safety. It's good for us to remember it, but it just makes it so that positive experiences require many, you know, it takes a split second of a negative experience, but it takes probably 30 seconds or more. My brain doesn't remember the numbers,
but the research is out there and it takes a far, far longer for you to be paying attention to a positive experience for it to get recorded into your memory. So what do we do with this? It's just so hard takes effort and work to see that there is good going on beauty, happening, joy available to us in the midst of trauma and heartache and difficulty.
But if we can take that challenge to stay alive and awake to the beauty, that's there maybe in moments of heartache, a Cardinal flies by if you could be on the lookout for beauty, train your heart and your eyes to, to watch for it, the compassion and the eyes of a friend, as they say, listen to your heartache. You know,
that is, that is a beautiful thing. And we want to, we want to stay present to that. And it's more honest to live in the world when we can admit that in the midst of the heartache, there's beauty still there. And that beauty is often the most poignant deep well to draw from and the beautiful, good parts of the world.
You know, maybe it's more honest, if we can admit that they're not just pink, sparkly, puff paint, or a Thomas Kincaid painting, there's heartache underlying and there's honesty. And admitting that I had the experience of walking with a friend through some, some real grief lately. She had a lot of heartache. I won't go into details about it,
but a lot of things in her life just felt like they were falling apart. And I remember her saying, I know there's value in feeling broken, opens your heart to compassion. It opens you to see maybe you need a savior outside of yourself, but why do I have to keep breaking? Why are there so many broken places? And, you know,
I asked her as this<inaudible> had been on my mind. I said, maybe it's like the<inaudible> and each place that's broken gets filled in with gold that reflects the light, lets more beauty in and brings a strength beyond what was there before then you wouldn't shy away from the brokenness if you saw it like that. If you knew that it could be that and just want to invite us all to pick up this practice of mending,
maybe it's a sweater as fall season comes along. That you've loved, but you stopped wearing because it had a few holes and was looking worn. Some people even go so far as to mend and an opposite color of thread, just to draw attention to the mending and let it be a part of the design and beauty, you know, instead of seeing something that had a broken or one place as needing to be thrown out,
why don't we see that as being part of its history, part of its story and allowing that mending to come in and bring a deeper richness to this item as it can, to our own hearts, I have a favorite mug that I had made that had a butterfly painted on it. It reminded me of the transformation we can find when we are willing to go into the cocoon and then bust out into greater creative freedom.
I love that mug. And as things do sometimes at broke, I have it sitting on my counter because I will not throw it away. I've ordered a Kent Sugi kit. If you are interested in joining me in this practice, you'll find that if you get a kit that allows your mended pieces to be food safe, they are rather expensive. I've even seen a friend,
however, take a DIY process of just taking fingernail Polish and mending things that way. Well, I've kind of split the difference and KonMari, you know, of that decluttering genius. She has a Kent SegY kit that does use some traditional materials, but say you get this glue like substance and then a gold dusting on top, but it won't be food safe.
It's a little bit of kind of an in-between for me. And if you want to follow along, I'll be sharing that process on my Instagram, which is Jane Boutwell studio, where I document many of my creative journeys. If you want to do this as well, I just want to invite us all to let this active mending be a practice of compassion for the broken messy places within us,
for the willingness to come in, to trace the extent of the harm, that's there to grieve it and then bring in forgiveness. Instead of holding on with resentment to that hurt. If we can release the person who is behind our harm and our hurt, if we can release them through forgiveness, it frees us to have our hands open, to hope,
which can be a rather defiant thing. Hope in the face of known vulnerability, known possibility of pain. That forgiveness is like the gold layer on top. I truly believe forgiveness is kind of the icing on the cake. The most powerful part of really bringing healing into those hurt places. But we can't forgive somebody deeply. If we don't admit how deeply harmed we had been.
Sometimes we get stuck with this freeze frame of a trauma experience and something that triggered hurt in us and we get locked with it in that kind of freeze frame. And we want to just avoid the pain of it. So we don't let ourselves sit with it long enough to see what was the message there. What was the lie that we believed in the midst of that?
The lie we believed about ourselves, that's where pain and trauma and harm has the most power. It invites us to believe a lie about ourselves. And if we can sit with those hurtful experiences long enough to see what the damage was, what the lie we believed about ourself was and who was behind it. Sometimes it's somebody who someone we really love and care about.
And we don't want the complicated thing of admitting that someone can be someone we love who is good and yet also hurt us, but there's so much power in exploring the depth of the hurt enough to find the lie that we believed. So we can bring truth in instead and see who it is that was behind that hurt, who maybe allowed it or contributed to it because that allows us to see that we maybe have a seed of resentment,
a place where we've been trying to protect ourself against that hurt. And that resentment keeps us in bondage. It's like drinking poison and hoping the other person gets hurt. Choosing forgiveness doesn't mean that you have to be in relationship again with somebody who is not safe, but it means that you are choosing to not hold onto the hurt anymore. I heard someone speaking about the forgiveness project and talking about how,
when we don't forgive, it's like having an airport full of planes, still in the terminals and no place for new experiences of good things to land. When we forgive, it's like letting those planes that have been taking up space at the airport, move out of the way and make room for new positive experiences to come in. I hope that you've enjoyed or found a little bit of encouragement to step into this risky defiant,
hope, this willingness to watch for beauty, even though that makes your heart more open, which makes it open to pain as well. But can we be brave enough to hold beauty and brokenness together to see that they're both existing around us all the time. And they're both within our own hearts and those we love. And can we choose to do mending whether it's gold mending or another form of mending an object as a tangible ritual metaphor to our own hearts to invite us and to this process of bringing gold and light and beauty into these hurting places until next time,
may you be well maybe braise and boldly, Hold your hands open to all the beauty and the brokenness that you find may courageously walk in to the creative freedom.<inaudible> Thank you for listening to the growing creative podcast. I'd like to thank shepherd Martin for audio editing and the music Is provided by sad. Moses. Don't forget to check out the show notes for transcripts and links to sources mentioned in the show today.
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