While amid the pandemic quarantine, I decided it was a good time to clean out my shed. This shed has not been cleaned in 6 years. It was chaos! I tend to keep everything I have had over the years that break. Sometimes it is motor parts, but mostly I keep broken pieces of plates, cups, pottery, or decorative tile, the more colorful the better. I am saving it for some kind of artwork, like a plant pot made from several coffee cups glued together then glazed. I even visit the neighbor's garbage cans for old worn out treasures. Once I found an old fireplace insert and made an outdoor fireplace, covered with Adobe and Mexican tile. I am now making an old electric oven firebox into a firebrick pizza oven! I have a great sense of well being from creating practical things from broken pieces.
While I was organizing my little chaotic universe of a shed, I thought of my good spiritual friend; we will call him Trai, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. Trai lives in a small monastery (now, years later, permanently closed) not far from my shack. I went there (before the pandemic) sometimes early in the morning to meditate with the Buddhist monks and then have a wonderful communal breakfast with them. Trai and I though hit it off, probably because he is a sort of outlaw in the monastery and is always getting in trouble with the Abbot! For example, the Abbot caught 2 women in his room - a BIG no-no at a Buddhist monastery (all very innocent according to Trai!). Another time, he was caught watching the romantic DVD Titanic starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. This was a very serious offense with the Master! Trai told me his punishment was "30 day in Ho," which translates to 30 beats on the huge, unbelievably loud monastery gong every morning. When Trai drives his beat-up Ford Maverick, he thinks he is a race car driver! I mean I will go into survival mode while screaming “TRE-EEEEEEE! SLOW DOWN!” He just laughs!
Trai has taught me a lot of spiritual lessons: How to use the 108 japa mala beads to meditate and enter a very deep concentration, the wonderful art of tea ceremonial before meditation and silent communication between spiritual friends afterward, while listening to his choice of Vietnamese music and its mystic weave. Trai is also a tea connoisseur; once I took him to Chinatown in Houston for a special tea he prescribed, “trà mạn” with jasmine and lotus. The tea shop proprietor knew him well! I tried to give Trai a twenty-dollar bill to buy the tea and he looked at me and said, "Why? I don't need money!"
Trai showed me his compassion one day (again breaking the rules of the monastery). It was 20 degrees outdoors and there was a dog outside his room moaning from the cold. He let him in to warm up. Dogs are not allowed in the monk's room!
"In Japan, broken objects are often repaired with gold. The cracks are seen as a unique part of the objects history. Which adds to its beauty. Consider this when you feel broken"
- Motywacha, Cytaty
What made me think about Trai while I was cleaning was the boxes of broken items I had. He once commented on my habit of keeping broken pottery. He said the word “Kintsugi.”
I replied, "What?"
He repeated, "Kintsugi--make something beautiful out of broken pieces." I think this is part of Trai's charm: Like a broken teacup, he has taken the different fragments of his character, both sharp and smooth, dark and light, putting them together into something unique and practical. A cup of wisdom anyone?
This pandemic chaos will end someday, and in the aftermath there will be broken pieces of our lives everywhere. Perhaps we can make something beautiful out of it all!
"The miracle is in the breaking and the power is in the broken pieces."
- Christine Caine
Ok, this shed is a mess! I got to get back to work and make some Kintsugi!
From the Little Shack: Be Happy!
