nature practising kintsugi

i have been sitting with this idea of kintsugi and architecture for as long as i can remember. building runs in my bones. it is part of my childhood, my teenage years, my whole life. i grew up around foundations and frameworks, around things taking shape from nothing. structure was language.

in my early years on building sites, cracks were numbers. tolerances. deviations from what was drawn. we measured them. assessed them. and upon request corrected them. there was no romance in it. only precision. perfection. precision was care.

and yet something in me always wondered.. what if perfection is not the only truth? when i turned eighteen, i travelled to japan alone, following something instinctive in me. i encountered kintsugi. it felt philosophical. a reverence for breakage. a tenderness toward what had been under strain. gold to honour a fractures survival. repair as acknowledgement. an honouring. about continuity. love. time. age. realness.

at eighteen, i understood cracks as deviation from the drawing. but even then i felt they were more beautiful as collaboration with time. something happens to a surface that has endured weather. it softens. it gathers story. it becomes itself more fully.

i carried this quietly for years. in notebooks. in daydreams about the home i would one day build. in the way i noticed ageing walls and floors and sun-cracked plaster. i did not speak about it much. it felt instinctive, sacred. something i knew in my heart and being before i had language for it.

then life did what life does. i was hurt. perhaps they were unaware i told myself. i turned inward. i hid it well. and somewhere in that turning, i pushed my idea underground too. i believe we learn in subtle ways to conceal our own fractures. to remain structurally sound. to keep the façade true. to carry the load without visible strain.

softness can feel like liability. but instincts do not disappear. they rest. and this week, my feelings returned through mother nature. pure. unforced. almond petals settling into cracks in stone. light gathering in the smallest separations. the earth mending itself without gold. no ceremony. just continuation.

i watched nature practising kintsugi without gold and I thought. this is me. i never liked gold much anyway. what moved me was never the shine. it was the honouring.

mother nature practicing kintsugi. by sarah jessica marie burns

i realised then that my idea had never left me. it had simply matured. it had passed through building sites, through travel, through disappointment, through silence. it had deepened beneath the surface, like our pomegranate trees strengthening in winter. there is a gentleness now in knowing this.

architecture does not have to deny fracture to be strong. a building holds stress, memory, weather. so do we. the strongest and more beautiful structures are not those that never cracked. they are the ones that shifted and still stand. perhaps the most honest spaces are not those that conceal every mark of time but those that allow continuity to remain visible. as truth.

and one day, when i have my clay house, there will be cracks in the floor. from living. from love. from drying and shifting and breathing with the seasons. and i will place flowers in them. always. this is my promise. small stems resting in the lines of movement. petals soft against earth. honouring my peace. my peace. my art. my way of seeing.

honouring my own creative becoming. and that will always be enough.

sarah jessica marie burns xx