“You can’t break something that’s already broken, but you can always build something new.“

–Yoko Ono (b. 1933; best known for her avant-garde art and her influence in the peace movement alongside John Lennon.)

The pieces are on top of a bookcase, and they’ve been there for a month or so. Every time I walk past, I see them, five torn pieces of paper boasting blue, picked up from the floor after my dog finished her clandestine mischief.

Once upon a time, I would have just thrown the paper scraps away. This time, I didn’t. This time, I’ll take my time to put the pieces back together.

Here’s why. What Ruby tore apart and left behind for me to find was an important family recipe. Imagine an exquisitely moist applesauce cake replete with raisins, pecans, and candied cherries, baked in a pressure cooker. My mother made the cake every year a few weeks before Christmas, and it was one of my favorites. I haven’t had one of those cakes in decades, maybe longer.

Lately, I’ve had a hankering for that cake, and I’ve searched all over the Internet for the recipe, not remembering that I had it already. My mother had given me the recipe. One day, while looking for something else, I found the full-page recipe with ingredients and instructions, all in her gentle cursive.

I’ll do my best to piece that page together again, hopefully with enough precision that I can read the full recipe. The page, of course, won’t be the same. It never can be. Ironically, it will take on even more meaning because I cared enough to mend it and put it back together. Even though it will always show its brokenness, it will still be my mother’s recipe in her handwriting on her paper. I’ll bake the cake when Christmas nears, and I fully believe that it will be the best one ever because it will have an extra scoop of love.

This is not the first time that I’ve mended the broken.

I’m thinking of a sculpture in my living room. Its earthy tones reflect seamlessly into the highly polished cherry coffee table. The sedimentary rock reveals the raw beauty of erosion and time, with jagged edges and smooth, wave-like ridges suggesting years of elemental force, reminders of the rock’s enduring strength. The fissures, winding through the top, were not there when my late partner gave me the sculpture. But a month or so before Allen’s death, he stumbled against it, and there it lay on the coffee table, shattered brokenness. It stayed there, a daily reminder of fragility and brokenness. Time passed, and I mustered up the courage to artfully glue it back together, its fissures now seemingly an integral part of the rock, adding an almost mystical feel. It’s still on my living room coffee table. It’s still very much alive and reminds me of Allen’s presence.

I had another encounter with the beauty of brokenness years earlier. I had built a graceful, curved walkway on the east side of my home, near the Koi Pond. I wanted to maintain a natural rustic look, so I made the walkway out of large, rectangular natural stone pavers, stabilized by the very earth itself. I leveled the ground as I put the pavers in place, making sure they didn’t move when stepped on. When I finished the 60-foot stretch of walkway, I decided to test its stability by jumping on each paver. When I landed on the second paver from the end, I heard a crack. I looked down and could see a fissure running through the center. I looked beneath the two pieces and discovered a rock, small enough to escape my searching eyes when leveling the paver but large enough to cause brokenness. My immediate reaction was to replace the paver. But I had second thoughts. It still functioned as an integral part of the walkway, and if I widened the fissure just a little and filled it with soil, it might even add a sense of age and character, especially when small patches of grass and weeds started to grow through the crack, proclaiming nature’s power to take back what we think is ours.

My decision to repair what was broken in these three instances was influenced directly by Kintsugi, the centuries-old Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the breaks with a lacquer that’s mixed with silver, gold, or even platinum. The intent, obviously, is not to disguise the brokenness but rather to celebrate its repair and survival, believing that the broken can be mended, made stronger, and remain useful and purposeful.

It seems to me that we can all benefit from an important lesson, whether it be found in broken Japanese art, a broken paver, a broken sculpture, or a broken recipe. The essence of being is being broken. The strength of being is the power of repairing the broken. The virtue of being is valuing and celebrating brokenness.

Let’s face it. As human beings, we are all flawed and broken. It seems to me that if we can repair our broken objects and continue to see their value and their beauty, so too can we repair the broken parts of our own lives.

In our personal lives, we’re destined to encounter moments of fracture—relationships that crack, trust that falters. It’s easy to walk away and to discard the pieces. But when something matters—when love, friendship, or family is at stake—mending becomes an act of grace. It is in the careful work of rebuilding that we find deeper connections and more profound love.

Similarly, in our professional lives, we are not immune to failure. Our careers break under the weight of expectations, and our ambitions sometimes shatter. But brokenness does not mark the end of a career; it marks a turning point. The effort to repair, to rebuild, to piece together what once was, shapes not just our work but our purpose.

And in our spiritual lives—our most intimate, vulnerable selves—there are moments of doubt, of disconnection, of feeling broken. Yet, like ancient pottery, our spiritual cracks are not meant to be hidden. They are to be filled with light, with the gold of wisdom, faith, and renewal. It is through our brokenness that we find our way back to our wholeness.

What is broken can be mended. What is flawed can be made beautiful again. The cracks, the breaks—they are part of the story. And for the things that matter most—our relationships, our work, our spirit—they are worth every moment of care, every act of patience, every effort to repair and restore so that we can celebrate beauty in brokenness.