The Gold in the Cracks

There is a centuries old Japanese technique called Kintsugi where broken pottery is repaired with gold. The cracks aren’t hidden. They’re filled and lacquered. Made to be stronger and more beautiful than they once were. Many years ago I visited one of these studios in Japan. Being much younger and carrying way less life experience at the time, I appreciated the principle but the deeper meaning is only now starting to reveal itself to me.

The philosophy behind it is simple and beautifully devastating: that breaking is part of the story. To hide it would be to lie about what it is. To fill it with gold is to say

“this happened, and it made you more wonderful, not less.”

I sat in a circle recently, under a large arching bamboo shala in the jungle glowing with nothing but moonlight, surrounded by people I had known for only a few days. The night air sat heavy as a blanket while the sound of exotic insects and birds conducted a beautiful and rhythmic symphony that regulated our nervous systems into some sense of security.

Everyone had a reason for being there and I had my own. My own fractures. My quiet reckoning with things I had been carrying for far too long. I wasn’t an observer. I was very much a part of it. As uncertain and searching as anyone else in the room.

But as the night unfolded I began to hear something that quietly made my heart ache. People talking about wanting to be fixed. About the ways they were wrong. About the version of themselves they had failed to become.

I looked around and I didn’t see broken people.

I saw extraordinary people. People carrying weight, yes. People with fractures, yes. But the fractures weren’t their truth. They were part of the story. And the story made them more interesting, more layered, more alive than anyone without one.

What I felt wasn’t pity. Maybe it was closer to grief — for the distance between how they saw themselves and what I could see from where I sat. That to me they were already whole. They had always been whole. That no ceremony, no journey, no amount of work would make them more worthy than they already were within that moment. Sitting in the dark, willing to feel everything and wanting to be better. To me there’s no greater example of someone embracing their wholeness than by accepting their fallibility.

And then I had to ask myself the harder question. Could I see the same thing when I looked inward? Could I extend to myself what I extended to them?

That is still the work.

The oldest spiritual traditions didn’t begin with the premise that we are broken. That came later. That was added.

I am not a religious person. Wasn’t raised that way and never sought it out. There were issues I took with institutions who seemed to dictate what people should think and how they should behave. Instead I’ve tried to follow my own path in life. I’ve witnessed firsthand the destructive corrosion of doctrines whose discriminations forced people further apart instead of helping bring them together. 

And yet in this phase of my life I found myself drifting towards something. A deeper meaning. Searching for answers in the individual way I operate. Diving headfirst and seeing where it lands. 

What I began finding my way toward had no building, no doctrine, no gatekeeper. I found it in jungles and in gardens. In ceremony and in stillness. In the mountains and in the early morning before anyone else is awake. In the ache of a plant medicine journey, the slow discipline of yoga, in the act of pressing seeds into soil and watching them become food.

Every one of these opened a door. And behind every door were not just answers but also larger questions. A deeper mystery. A more honest not-knowing.

At first this unsettled me. “I’m doing the work. I should be moving closer, closing the gap”. But now I think it may just be the secret. That the further in you go, the more vast it becomes. Perhaps ‘Understanding’ is not the destination. Awareness is.

I’m wondering if my resistance to religion was a resistance towards moving towards something that I considered hurtful. But in fact, I was moving towards something else. Something much older than that. A personal system of beliefs that existed before anyone decided they had the right to define who gets to be sacred and who doesn’t.

What I’m building from these experiences is not a religion. But it is mine. A personal practice assembled entirely from direct encounters. From what I have actually felt, seen and known to be true in my own body, on my own terms, and in my own time. Perhaps I’m finally understanding what spirituality is. Nobody gave it to me. Nobody can take it away.

And it doesn’t begin with the premise that I am broken.

It begins with the gold.

The cracks are not evidence of failure. They are the record of a life fully lived. Fill them with something luminous and let people see them. That is not damage. That is the whole point.

Where I currently am, and what I believe is available to anyone willing to look, is a path back to something ancient. Something that was always there, waiting beneath every doctrine that tried to claim it. We find it in different places. Sometimes in the grandest of gestures — a ceremony in the dark, a journey that undoes you and forces you to put the pieces back together. Sometimes it’s in the smallest of things — the smell of soil after rain, the dirt under your fingernails after tending to the garden, learning from a great book or yoga class. And occasionally it comes from the faintest of pulls from quiet voices that whisper maybe you’re not done seeking just yet. All of this work is incredibly valuable. So is being able to recognize that. 

The invitation is always the same. To step toward your own version of the sacred. To craft it from what you have actually lived. And to let it be entirely, unapologetically yours.

The ritual thread of Humble Creative Society exists because we believe that the most important creative practice is not just what you make. It is how you show up — to yourself, to the world, to the mystery of being alive in it. Ritual is how we tend that relationship. Not because anyone told us to. Because we chose to.

We were never broken. We were always becoming.