Radiance
Reflections on Elderhood and the Gold Within
When something breaks, especially something that holds monetary or deep emotional value, an instinctive human reaction is often to put it back together—to repair it so that it looks and feels as before. However, not being much of a “fix-it” guy, mechanically or emotionally, I tend more towards looking at the broken pieces, intuitively sensing what the “break” might be trying to show me, and responding accordingly. Perhaps something wants to be added or taken away; maybe a completely new form wants to be created.
No doubt my approach, at least in part, was shaped years ago when I first learned about the Japanese stoneware and pottery repair technique called kintsugi (“golden joinery”) or kintsukuroi (“golden repairs”). Instead of trying to repair the broken pottery in a way that it appears as if it were never broken, the kintsugi artist joins the broken pieces together with gold lacquer into a new design.
The intention is to highlight the history of the object—its original idea, the travails and brokenness it has endured, as well as its usefulness and beauty. Through the repair, the vessel might retain its fundamental original form yet now have a new subtle or not-so-subtle accent. Or, the artist might choose to let the broken pieces and gold lacquer inspire a completely new form.
Recently in the monthly meeting of a writing group in which I’m a participant, our first writing prompt was a photo of a 17th-century Japanese stoneware tea bowl that had been broken and repaired with kintsugi. We were given twenty minutes to write about an object, a person, or an event about which the concept of kintsugi inspired a new perspective.
As I began to write, I had a fleeting intuitive vision of an ancient sage sitting in an oversized heavily carved wooden chair and speaking to a large group of people. He was telling a story about beauty, value, and what truly matters in life. And as he spoke, he held up the Japanese tea bowl from the photo we had been given for all to see.
Gold, he said. Gold in you.
Gold in life. Gold as value.
Gold as truth. Gold as beauty.
Not gold everywhere—
just in the opening places;
the times and places where things
break open.
Gold that emerges from the inside,
not added from the outside.
Inner gold.
Gold that was waiting to be seen.
Gold that was there all along.
And then the vision was gone.
I breathed in the image of the tea bowl.
I breathed in the sage’s words.
I breathed into my life.
And I kept writing.
And from that moment unfolded another perspective on kintsugi. That perhaps it was not simply an art form emerging out of a need to repair something broken or as a metaphorical way of looking at life. What if it could also show us a new perspective on living?
I began to see another way to look at life’s unfolding, no matter our age. And for me personally, a specific way for me to look at elderhood, including my own.
Aging is a journey, to be sure. And I acknowledge that by today’s longevity standards, I’m hopefully still relatively early on in the process. I’m 71 and healthy. Life is good. And yet physical compromises as well as losses and their accompanying grief come in myriad forms at my stage of life, and probably will come even more frequently as time goes on.
In kintsugi, the gold lacquer is applied externally to the broken pottery to bind the pieces back together again. Yet what if the beauty in aging is more about allowing the internal gold—the gold from within—to be revealed? To shine through cracks in skin, through the wrinkled body, through what might appear as brokenness to the observer, yet to the elder could merely be a next opening for their inner gold to seep through the surface?
Idealistic perhaps, yet I’ve been blessed with role models for exactly this in both of my parents. They faced debilitating health challenges in their later years. Yet each in their own ways, they chose to lean into their inner gold rather than give undue attention to the cracks, the brokenness, the illnesses that would ultimately claim their lives.
They were at peace with the inevitable passage across the river of life to an unseen world. A significant part of their inner gold was their deep faith and their embodiment of love. Not naïve faith; never denying realities. Not superficial love. Rather, deep faith and love in the heart of their being. It’s who they were at their core. And it was the presence they lived into more and more in their later years.
Looking back, I can see that their inner gold was always there—just a bit more under wraps until its time had come. And when they, as well as those of us who loved them, needed it as never before.
And then, there it was, seeping through the cracks in their physical being—seeping through the cracks in their presence. And the more the gold seeped through, the more the light within them shone. The deep wisdom within them somehow knew how to let that gold start flowing and keep flowing as they met each new day. And somehow, even through their challenges, even as their life force diminished, they became more beautiful, more luminous, more vibrant in spirit. They became ever more radiant works of art.
Which makes me wonder what the gold is within me. What will seep through the cracks of my being as I journey on through my sage years? As my body and spirit will, in time, give itself up to the ages, and I, too, will cross that river of life to the other side.
For me, perhaps it’s also faith and the embodiment of love, if different from that of my parents. Or maybe not so much. Because their faith and love is my heritage, and that heritage lives and breathes through me now. On the surface, my story is different than theirs. Yet perhaps at its essence, it’s the same. Just like the mystical underpinnings of all spiritual traditions, at their essence, feel like they come from the same source.
Kintsugi.
Maybe it’s not just
a repair technique for art.
Maybe it’s a way of living—
a deeper understanding of
radiance.
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Beautiful perspective 🙏🏻
Thank you for the reminder of the gold that was always apparent in your parents’ lives. I lost track of them after they moved from Nashville so I didn’t know them as their health declined but the gold in each of them is always there in my memory.