Thought for the week: Gillie Bolton mends her ways
‘The mend in an object is sometimes its strongest part.’
Gerard Manley Hopkins glories in the muddle that is the natural world. But the imperfections of people and nature can be far from endearing or beautiful: Ukrainians suffer the horrors of war; Syrians endure devastating earthquakes, bringing down homes with loved ones inside. We ourselves survive sickness, abuse, accidents, bereavements, albeit wounded. We ask ‘Why do some hurt others in this terrible way?’, sometimes ‘Why me?’, sometimes ‘Why did I do that?’
The worst to live with is when we hurt others – most often those nearest to us. Looking back we can see where we allowed ourselves to travel down wrong, even very bad, paths, sometimes by omission, sometimes commission.
We are all imperfect: makers of mistakes and blunders, sometimes hideous or disastrous. I feel ‘If only I had known better, known what I know now’. Yet we become who we are by learning from our mistakes, even the terrible ones. We gain the strength and understanding to do much-needed work in the world.
Forgiving others for harming us is hard, especially if the damage was serious. Forgiving ourselves can be harder, seemingly impossible when we are brought low with shame. I appreciate ‘character development’ in fiction, but it’s different when the character is me. Yet I do know that living with endless ‘if onlys’ saps vital energy.
The Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi has been helpful to me. This tells us how everything is imperfect, incomplete, and impermanent: everything in the world returns to the earth where it came from. My grandmother always said ‘going home’ where others might say ‘wearing out’. And as Shelley reminds us in ‘Ozymandias’, we are not that important. This ‘King of Kings’ is now ‘shattered’ and ‘half sunk’ in the ‘boundless and bare’ desert.
Wabi-sabi sees things as beautiful if handmade and a bit rough, or ‘dappled’ and ‘freckled’. Some are made more precious by being patched, darned, or pieced together with glue. I’ve felt broken and roughly mended, having been abused as a child, and muddled through life making serious mistakes. The mend in an object is sometimes its strongest part; the darn lasting beyond the sleeve, the glue beyond the pottery. Could this be true of me? Could learning from the wrong things I’ve done have made me stronger, more able to do some good in the world?
The loveliest broken things, according to wabi-sabi are mended with gold. The break and mend become a feature: look at this well-used object, so cherished that the most precious material was used to put it together again! Being damaged, and making what good we can of that damage or guilt, is perhaps one of the most significant aspects of living and loving life to the full.
Pied beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877 (published 1918)
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