I recently read Nnedi Okorafor’s lovely book, Broken Places and Outer Spaces: Finding Creativity in the Unexpected, where she talks about how a botched operation that left her paralyzed from the waist down – what she calls “the Breaking” – was the beginning of her path to being a writer. In her book she mentions the Japanese art of kintsukuroi, which, Roshi Joan Halifax tells us in her blog post “The Golden Repair,” “is the art of repairing broken pottery with powdered gold or platinum mixed with lacquer, so that the repair reflects the history of breakage. The ‘repaired’ object mirrors the fragility and imperfection of life— and also its beauty and strength. The object returns to wholeness, to integrity.”
Nnedi and Roshi Joan, you get one pingy-dingy each! Thank you for reminding us that broken does not mean The End, and that frailty, human and otherwise, can add to our understanding of what it means to be human, what it means to find strength.
http://www.nnedi.com/books/broken_places_outer_spaces.html
I’m a typewriter whompin’, card catalogue lovin’ white girl from back in the day, and I yearn for a time before the covers of trade paperbacks were all squidgy, so you can imagine that I don’t actually understand what a pingback is. I do know that it can in some way be part of spreading the love, and since that’s what I’m all about at The Total Femme… every Wednesday, I pay homage to the laughter, love, and inspiration to be had elsewhere online.
At the Total Femme, my intention is to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday and Femme Friday on Friday. Rather than play catch-up in a stressful fashion on those weeks when life prevents posting, I have decided to just move gaily forward: if I miss a Monday, the next post will be on Wednesday, and so on. Thank you, little bottle of antibiotics for inspiring me in this! (“…if it’s almost time for the next dose, skip the missed dose and continue your regular dosing schedule. Don’t take a double dose to make up for a missed one.”) As I recover from treatment for breast cancer, however, I’m just going to post whenever I can manage.
The Total Femme 