Silver and Gold

I watched my dog root around the patio this evening. His nose was intently pressed into the aggregate concrete, wrinkling into rolling folds with each sniff, passing over and wading through scattered pieces of wood chips that he had chewed through earlier. Soon, he would take off like a terror, splash landing into a plastic pool full of icy hose water.

The moments are simple. Bare. Light. Like the breeze through the vegetable garden, unexpectedly easy.

This is a life that I didn't dream putting together.

Ease is so often under appreciated. Don't you think?

Death Cab for Cutie released a new album a few months back titled, Kintsugi. And while I'm not overly fanatic about their music, I do listen. But more importantly, I listened as they dove into the definition of kintsugi, a Japanese technique of repairing broken pottery by sealing the cracks with a lacquer infused with metallic dust. So the cracks aren't hidden, they're highlighted.

Celebrated.

The repair becomes a part of the story of the item. It is equal to the history and just as important as the pottery as a whole. The reparation reaches to illuminate the vulnerability to breaking and the beauty of resilience.

I'll be 35 here, soon. And I cannot think of a better way to view my life. Age has never been a cause for concern for me. My vanity hasn't been tested and I don't know that it ever will. I've never been the person to put timelines on my life; I've never had a checklist of things to achieve. I haven't felt like I have failed at much, which is either ridiculously naive of me, or incredibly lucky.

The sharp edge of this is that I have had enough thrown at me to turn cracks into jagged shards. And I can unabashedly admit that some of those breaks took years to fix.

All I've ever wanted was to be at ease. And I am.

The cracks are healed, sealed with silver and gold, glimmering veins connecting all the solid pieces together.