Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
~Leonard Cohen
I was working in my office when my housecleaner Maribel came in and stood silently next to my desk. She seemed nervous, yet resigned. She was holding something in her hands. I immediately recognized the broken pieces of a favorite ceramic bowl I’d displayed on a chest in my living room. “Oh no!” I exclaimed, barely concealing my disappointment.
Matte white clay, the bowl was lined with a shiny, golden glaze. I loved its rough simplicity on the outside; it’s gleaming beauty on the inside. I loved that it reminded me of the friend who gave it to me.
“I don’t know…how to put it back together,” Maribel said haltingly, turning the remains of the bowl over in her hands. I took the pieces from her and placed them on my desk.
“It’s ok, don’t worry, it’s just a bowl,” I said, trying not to act like I cared that much about some stupid bowl.
I thought about my friend Sally, who’d just been visiting from England. A group of us had met out for dinner the first night she arrived. “I’ve lost my Rolex,” she announced as we were being seated. She said it with all of the gravity of someone who’d just misplaced one of their 12 pairs of reading glasses they got on clearance at Walmart.
The rest of the party gasped exclamations of sympathy before immediately switching into Sherlock-Holmes mode. “Where did you have it last?” “Are you sure it’s lost and not stolen?” “Did you look through all your luggage?” And of course, the obligatory “I’m sure it’ll turn up.”
Sally sat calmly, taking it all in. “I’m not worried,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s just stuff.”
Not since Doris Day belted out Que Sera Sera in “The Man Who Knew Too Much” had there been this much unbridled optimism. It was exactly the kind of thing you’d expect to hear from someone who’d just spent 10 days in a Vipassana silent retreat as Sally recently had.
What happens on a Vipassana silent retreat? Well, mostly nothing. You sit there all day in silent meditation while learning about the awareness of what’s actually happening inside your body. No iPhones, no books, no journals and definitely no Rolexes.
Sally eventually found the Rolex. She’d taken it off at bedtime and it had somehow fallen underneath the mattress. Apparently the clarity and self-awareness of Vipassana are no match for the effects of jet lag and mountain-town acclimatization.
Sometimes you lose an object. And, sometimes the weight of an object is lost on you. As Sally said, it’s just stuff. Everything can be replaced.
The impermanence and imperfection of objects makes me think of wabi-sabi—the Japanese philosophy of finding beauty in the broken. It’s about recognizing that all things are in a constant state of flux. Flaws, like scars, tell a story. They can even make an object or a moment or a person more beautiful—if only we slow down long enough to notice them.
When I downsized to move from Rochester to Park City, Utah, I got rid of almost everything I’d owned. One of the few items I kept was a little glass bulldog that had belonged to my grandmother. She’d kept it by her kitchen sink and hung her wedding ring on its tail when she did dishes. From the time she’d owned it, its ears and paws had long been chipped; its tail broken and glued back together; its pathetic, little painted face half worn away. But it represents everything I loved about my grandma. Broken and flawed; fragile, yet tough as nails. If on my deathbed, I utter Citizen-Kane-style the single word, “Bulldog,” you’ll know exactly the reason why.
I walked into my office the other day. I looked at the pieces of the bowl, dejectedly cradled together on my desk like a stack of orange peels bound for the disposal. I found a bottle of glue in a drawer. Carefully pressing the broken shards together, I wiped away with my finger the blobs of Mod Podge that had seeped out of the cracks. They were now barely visible, save for the trail of my fingerprints along their faint fissures. Two tiny pieces from the edge of the bowl were still missing. I quickly dismissed the brief thought of searching for them inside the vacuum dustbin. The bowl was perfect just as it was.
Kate Sonnick is a freelance writer and creative director who moved from Rochester to Park City, Utah, where she finds beauty in the mountains, the company of friends and the unexpected cracks in everything.
