Peter Mayer's song "Japanese Bowl" illustrates a process that I deeply appreciate: it takes something ordinary and finds in it a metaphor that points toward another layer of meaning just below the surface. The song is about "kintsugi," the ancient Japanese art of using gold to repair cracks and chips in ordinary bowls:

I'm like one of those Japanese Bowls

That were made long ago

I have some cracks in me

They have been filled with gold

That's what they used back then

When they had a bowl to mend

It did not hide the cracks

It made them shine

People often come to therapy because their "cracks" have begun to show--an important relationship has begun to unravel, or they've become depressed, or they feel the stress at work is about to overtake them. Typically, they come looking for ways to hide their cracks, to make them go away, to solve the "problem." They do this because they believe that the cracks mean they are flawed, and that flaws are somehow embarrassing or even shameful.

Curious about the bowls that inspired Mayer's song, I did a Google search and found an article about kintsugi on the Smithsonian web site that suggests the opposite may be true:

"Tea-ceremony aesthetics often focused on the beauty in imperfection...Even in tea bowls that were not repaired, people came to look for the slight idiosyncrasies, even flaws, in the glaze, that made one bowl more interesting than another."

What if our cracks are not problems to be solved, but openings--places where life can enter us, transform us, fill us with "gold," and make us even more beautiful? What if Leonard Cohen got it right in his song "Anthem":

So 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.

As we acknowledge our cracks, as we relax and let go of the quest to be perfect, as we embrace the life that is right in front of us, we open ourselves to the light, and to a kind of existence that Wendell Berry writes about in his poem "The Sycamore":

"Over all the scars has come the seamless white
of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history
healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection
in the warp and bending of its long growth.
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate."

Where are the cracks in your life? What kind of light is trying to get in through those cracks? How might you "shine" if you were to fill them with "gold" rather than trying to hide them? What does the strange perfection of your own journey look like? How might the "accidents" of your life be gathered into a sense of purpose?

Therapy at its best is about opening up to questions like these. It's about letting the everyday concerns of your life lead you to the deeper currents of the soul. It's about starting with anxiety, or depression, or uncertainty...and ending with a life that is richer, fuller, and more interesting...not in spite of a few cracks, but because of them.