What is broken tends to stay that way, unless time and love can patch together what was injured into something healed and new.
In Japan, repairing broken pottery with gold leaf is called kintsugi, "golden joinery," or kintsukuroi, "golden repair." If we can pick up the pieces, there may be new life in store.
The week began with some terrible break-ups.
A hidden Pacific ocean volcano erupted much too close to the Tonga shore, driving fierce and fatal waves up and onto living spaces.
A final search for the Nazi informer who gave up Anne Frank's hidden Amsterdam address revealed a neighbor as tragic as he was cruel, his own family facing similar death.
I did not want to get up this morning.
Promises broken, hidden villains, innocent lives sacrificed, hearts unmended—what can glue such fractures together again?
Navalny, now in prison one year, regrets nothing and told us yesterday once again: ничего не бойтесь."Don't be afraid of anything. This is our country and we have no other."
Martin Luther King Jr, remembered (and disremembered) yesterday, saw beyond the broken wars and lives to a Promised Land: "I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” One day later, he was murdered.
It's a long arc, the one bending toward that future promise.
Outside today the sky was blue, unbroken.
A friend sat me down for coffee and a pastel de nata.
The waves in the bay were blue, stretching out to sea in unbroken sequence.
A doctor made me smile again. I am not yet knocking at death's door!
My heart, broken, patched up, cracked again, re-sealed, smiled again.
Thank you.
Fearless, fearful, we take a bit of humor, a bit of hope, a small joke, solder it up with the gold leaf, the unbroken stuff of repair, and carry on.
18 JANUARY 2022