THE ART OF BECOMING WHOLE

They say light enters through the cracks – but no one tells you how much it hurts to break open first.

No one explains how loud it is when your soul splinters; how silence hums like thunder afterward.

Yet somewhere between the shattering and the stillness, something holy begins to whisper: “This is not the end. This is where the gold begins.”

I’ve spent a long time studying the faultlines… the ones in people, in places, in my own reflection. I used to think restoration meant erasure, that healing meant gluing yourself back together so perfectly that no one could tell you’d ever fallen apart. But the truth is less polite. It’s messy, molten, and sometimes divine.

That’s the beauty of Kintsugi – the Japanese art of “golden joinery.” When pottery breaks, it isn’t hidden or discarded. Its cracks are filled with lacquer and powdered gold, silver, or platinum. The wound becomes a vein of light. The damage becomes design. The brokenness doesn’t disappear; it becomes the masterpiece.

There’s a Japanese proverb that says: “Nana korobi ya oki.” (Fall down seven times, stand up eight.)

That, to me, is the sound of grace in motion – the rhythm of resurrection.

We live in a world that worships flawlessness. It teaches us to filter our faces, flatten our emotions, and pretend that we were never fragile. But the soul was never meant to be porcelain. It was meant to be clay – soft enough to be reshaped by the hands of experience, strong enough to withstand the kiln. When the fire comes, it doesn’t destroy what’s real; it refines it.

Kintsugi reminds me that scars are sacred maps. They trace the places where life refused to let me remain the same. They show where the breaking happened – and where the light was invited in. I think of every heartbreak, every betrayal, every tear that felt like it would never end. All of it was lacquer and dust before the gold. All of it was shaping.

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” – Rumi

I used to flinch at that quote. Now I see how true it is. Healing isn’t about going back to who you were; it’s about becoming who you couldn’t have been without the fall.

When I write, when I create, when I stand before my own mirror, I see the traces of every version I’ve been – the soft ones, the fierce ones, the ones who begged God for mercy and the ones who declared, “Enough.” I see the storm I once called love, the silence I once called peace, the lessons I once mistook for punishment. They all shine differently now. Some in gold. Some still raw and red. But all mine.

Kintsugi isn’t just art – it’s a worldview. It’s the radical belief that nothing truly broken is ever wasted. The crack itself becomes part of the narrative. The fracture becomes testimony. It’s a reminder that perfection was never the point; presence was. The hands that mend are just as holy as the gold they use.

And maybe that’s what redemption really looks like – not a return to the past, but a revelation of worth that could only exist because of what cracked. The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi teaches that beauty lives in impermanence – that everything exquisite is, by nature, fleeting. Flowers wilt, tides change, faces age. Yet in that transience lies meaning. The finite gives birth to wonder. The imperfect makes us human.

There was a time when I begged for wholeness. Now I pray for authenticity. There’s a difference. Wholeness demands proof; authenticity allows breath. Wholeness says, “Be fixed.” Authenticity whispers, “Be true.”

Sometimes, truth is standing amid the shards and saying, “This, too, is me.”

I think often of the line: “You call it damage – I call it design.”

That’s Kintsugi. That’s grace with gold in its hands.

And maybe that’s what God has been doing all along – not erasing our cracks, but highlighting them. Every heartbreak gilded. Every loss re-loved into meaning. Every silence filled not with absence, but with refinement. When He said, “Behold, I make all things new,” maybe He meant exactly that – all things, even the ones we swore were ruined.

The storm doesn’t erase the sea; it only rearranges the waves. And when the tide pulls back, what’s left glimmers in the light – pieces of who we were, who we are, who we’re becoming. That’s Kintsugi, too. The joining of time with gold. The merging of sorrow and strength.

There’s a quiet courage in being visible while still unfinished. To stand before the world and say, “I’m still being mended,” requires more bravery than pretending to be untouched. Every time I’ve told my story – every time I’ve chosen vulnerability over veneer – someone else whispered, “Me too.” That’s the alchemy of honesty. It turns isolation into communion.

So if you’re reading this with your own shards around your feet, don’t rush to glue them in the dark. Let the light find them first. Let time teach you which pieces to keep and which to release. You don’t need to be seamless to be seen. You just need to be real.

As the artist Leonard Cohen once wrote: “There is a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.”

Maybe the light isn’t meant to heal every wound. Maybe it’s meant to dwell there, to glow through it, to turn the fracture into a lantern for someone else still lost in their storm.

My cracks gleam now – not because the breaking didn’t hurt, but because I finally stopped apologising for it. The gold is not decoration; it’s declaration. A promise that even what tried to destroy me has been repurposed for beauty. A vow that every loss carries its own resurrection.

And if you ever see me glimmer in the dark, that’s not polish – that’s history turned holy.