Kintsugi
Kintsugi is an ancient Japanese technique of repairing old broken objects, especially porcelain & ceramic ones, with gold-dusted or gold-mixed lacquer. You have seen this before. It is fairly easy to do yourself, with the right materials. Sometimes, kintsugi is deliberate. A piece is broken on purpose and mended. Or the piece is created with kintsugi. But most of the time, kintsugi is done to something that you didn’t intend to break. And that’s where I found myself a year or so ago, when I broke a mug. I found that mug in 2018 at a local craft show, was drawn to the glaze, bought precisely one of it. I used it one day in 2020, threw it in the kitchen sink, and in the process of filling the dishwasher it slipped out of my hands and dropped back into the sink, cracking noticeably down one side. It was not major, but it would leak, and the whole purpose of a mug is to not leak. I went back to the maker’s website, thinking I could buy a replacement, but no, the ceramicist was eternally sold out. Fine. I kept the broken mug on a shelf in my living room for a year. In the meantime, I found a mug that looked almost identical, but it was made by a much larger company. I bought two. I felt a little bad about it. And then a bunch of things happened in my life, as it does, and I forgot that I had a mug on my shelf. Friends started coming back over again. In 2021, my pal Jones noticed the mug at one of my group meals, and asked if he could repair it. I said sure, handed it over, and forgot about it again. A couple of months later, he brought it back with a gold seam down the side. It felt new. It felt like something else. I was astounded, deeply grateful. He said it would take some time to fully dry & harden. I gave it a month, checked off a calendar reminder that it was ready, and the next time Jones came over, inaugurated the new old mug by serving him tea in it. An old version of myself would have thrown the mug away. I’m glad that this version of myself didn’t. There are many mugs. I can buy any of them. Nice fancy mugs are, like, $30. Henry’s shitpost mugs are $13.40. I have options. Meanwhile, kintsugi repair kits cost about as much on Amazon as a whole new fancy mug, and then after factoring in the time that it takes to repair the thing, forget it. I mend my clothes. I wear holes in my denim and get patches sewn on. I soak stains and throw away almost nothing. When something is very dead, I don’t throw it away; I cut it up and use bits of it to grease my bike chain. So why am I not approaching ceramics with the same sort of care? At lunch today, I served tea, like I do, and I handed someone the kintsugi mug. They lit up, like “Oh, I’m special!” And they are, of course, but I wasn’t really thinking about who would get the mug. I have many mugs. One of them was mended, and it’s part of a deeper story, one of resilience and durability and seeing things anew. We are all worthy of kintsugi.