The Two Bowls in My Office
If your eyes have ever drifted to the two framed paintings in my office, the ones with the gold seams, you’re not alone. Sometimes it’s just a glance that lingers a moment longer than expected, sometimes it appears as a quiet pause in the middle of a sentence, and sometimes it’s harder to name than that, just a sense that something about them stays with you even as the conversation moves on. Some people ask about them, and others simply keep noticing them without ever quite asking what they mean.
They are paintings of Kintsugi bowls, created in collaboration with an artist I deeply respect, and when we designed them the intention was not simply to make something beautiful but to create something that could hold meaning in a quieter way, something that might meet people without needing to explain itself right away.
I don’t remember exactly when I first started noticing Kintsugi, only that about ten years ago it began to feel like it was showing up everywhere I went, in spaces I was in, in workshops led by people I respected, in ideas that seemed to echo something I already felt but had not yet put words to. It had that same quality I once wrote about with music, when something seems to find you at just the right moment rather than something you go out searching for, and there is a kind of recognition that happens before you fully understand why.
At some point, that feeling connected back to something much earlier. I remembered seeing a framed Kintsugi bowl in my grandmother’s house when I was a child, and I can still picture myself noticing it and wondering, in a simple and almost puzzled way, why someone would frame something that had been broken, and then just as clearly not asking the question out loud. I don’t know why that stayed with me, but it did, and it feels connected now in a way it didn’t then.
In the office, one of the bowls is a deep, steady blue, and the gold tracing its cracks feels calm and almost understated, like something that has taken its time and does not need to draw attention to itself, while the other is warmer and more radiant, with seams that carry a kind of light that feels more visible. They are different in tone, but they seem to be pointing toward something similar, something about how things come back together in their own way.
The idea behind Kintsugi is simple in its form and not so simple in what it holds. When something breaks, it is repaired with gold, not to hide the cracks but to make them part of what is seen, and over time I have come to understand how much that resonates with the work we do here, not as a concept to explain but as something people begin to feel in their own way.
People often ask about the two bowls, sometimes right away and sometimes after months of sitting in the room, and very often once we begin talking about them something in it lands. I think about one young man who has lived through a great deal of rupture, relationships that did not hold, jobs that did not last, long stretches where things felt heavy and stuck, and at some point he began to describe those experiences in his own words, saying that it felt like more gold was being woven into his life each time something broke. He did not say it in a polished or poetic way, he said it because it felt true to him, and that is usually when I am reminded that the meaning is not in the painting itself but in the way people begin to see their own lives through it.
The work here is not about returning to some earlier, unbroken version of yourself, and it is not about pretending that certain parts of your story did not happen. It is about being able to turn toward what has been carried, even the parts that have been easier to set aside, and to begin to understand them with a little more space and a little more care, knowing that this process does not move in one direction or at one pace but tends to shift over time in ways that are not always predictable and are often more meaningful than we expect.
So when something in you pauses in front of those paintings, even briefly, I tend to take that seriously, not in a heavy way but in a respectful one, because usually when something like that catches your attention it is not random. Something in you recognized something, and that kind of noticing is often enough for us to begin.