There is a type of Japanese pottery, Kintsugi, where cracks are celebrated ! In fact they are filled with gold. This is purposeful because it highlights that our broken bits can become the most beautiful, powerful and wonderful parts of ourselves. I love how this art form is a metaphor for us humans. Our ego wants us to be as perfect as possible, our pride and our fear get in the way of embracing our shadows so they can become the tools through which we journey to our better selves.
It is very easy to shut down our spirit; adult demands, money problems, the Hurdy Gurdy of every day, difficult relationships, our incomplete lop sided views and opinions. Too many of us live on auto pilot, too many of us don’t do things because they are challenging or downright scary. Sometimes our pride isolates us and we become like a lonely barren mountain on which nothing will grow. Sometimes fear and mistrust means we cocoon ourselves into lives that are duvet safe. But, then we wonder why we feel small, grey , dissatisfied or bored. We have become our own worst enemy. It is ok to drop to the floor and re -assemble ourselves , with wonderful gold cracks, to challenge ourselves that bit further, to have challenging conversations, grow in unexpected angles and curves. Our bodies and minds are meant to be challenged.
I have made a pact with myself. Where possible and when I am conscious of it, I pledge to live my life with curiosity, strength and kindness. I would like to leave this mortal coil knowing I have done my best to live wisely, well and as fully as I can, not hiding because something seemed too daunting . I aim to be a Kintsugi pot!!
I have written a song on the piano with this very theme in mind. I have recently manifested a wonderful digital piano in exchange for some therapeutic singing lessons. The previous owner is a girl on my counselling course; she no longer wanted it as it reminded her of some trauma in her life. The moment I saw this girl and saw how she had shuttered herself away I wanted to help her and give her singing lessons. It would have been a bit weird to have waltzed up to her and suggested this but somehow the universe conspired to help us both! The tutor paired us together to practice our counselling skills and before you know it I had confessed to my difficult , uphill struggle to become a song writer and she to the things in her life that had caused her to close up and in on herself. She has given me the piano and I am working with her with singing to find her spark, her smile, her confidence and perhaps a little of herself. The chorus arrived first, so I have put it at the beginning because it felt right!
This is the song :
Beauty Girl
Chorus
Beauty Girl, beauty girl
Please look within
The shadows and gloom are haunting you still.
Beauty girl, beauty girl
Please look again.
No place, no place
For shadows of night.
V1
Long is our journey
The road never ends
The snakes and the ladders
Are just everywhere.
Fractals of light
Just waiting and waiting,
Waiting and waiting
To shine so very bright.
Repeat chorus
V2
Our cracks and our frailties
Become our gold
The mending, the magic
Of stories resolved.
Be a fractal of light
Being and shining
Being and shining
So very bright.
Coda
Shining
Luminescent Pearl.
We hold and we hold
Light everywhere.
I am beginning- just beginning to become slightly more fluent with chords so this piece is showing my Growing on the piano. The coda is very spacious and impressionistic and shivering, quivering with other worldly light. It is a hovering, beautiful melody full of suggested potential.
We are all part of that divine light, it is not separate from us. We are all fractals of it….hovering in the gloaming to shine and be our best selves where our cracks have become our gold …..
I hope you shine so very bright…..
Abi's World of Music 