FISSURES
A metaphor for embracing your flaws and imperfections.
The Scar Clan
“Tears are a river that take you somewhere. Weeping creates a river around the boat that carries your soul-life. Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace new, someplace better … For women, tears are the beginning of initiation into the Scar Clan, that timeless tribe of women of all colours, all nations, all languages, who down through the ages have lived through a great something, and yet who stood proud”
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With The Wolves
“Kintsugi is the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together with gold — a metaphor for embracing your flaws and imperfections”
I see the fissures that appear in my womb woman sculptures as symbols of cracks, and later healed scars, in the foundations of our personal lives and growth.
Life is full of challenges and sometimes events occur that have the power to change the course of how we choose to live thereafter, do we crumble, do we heal, grow, and thrive, do we simply exist one moment at a time with survival the only light to hold us.
Some of these cracks run deep, to our very core, others shake us without destabilizing us completely.
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Every woman has her own fissures, her own foundation shaking experiences, her own life changing events, all are important, all are worthy of respect, all deserve to be honoured.
Kintsugi, highlighting these fissures with gold, feels like such an honouring.
Peregrina
O mother of the sea
lend me a wave that is strong and true
to carry me from this Age which unbinds me
I do not need a ship, mother,
but make it a buoyant swell
to bear me up and float me on the sea’s dreaming
then beach me on some lighter shore.
When I land there, give me warp and weft again,
and an urchin quill to remind me
how the prettiest barb can lodge under your skin
and leave you undone.
Only lend me a loom and I will
take up the threads of this unravelled life.
I will weave a braid from three strands of seaweed
I will wind it three times around my finger
I will dig my salt-encrusted hands into the soil
and wed myself to the thirsty
brown roots of a new beginning.
~ Sharon Blackie (If Women Rose Rooted)
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