Honouring our scars - a mending workshop
Dear friends, this is the first of 4 creative workshops that are part of the wabi-sabi month I’m running at the moment. I’ll share the others over the next few weeks.
Scroll to the bottom to learn the technique ⬇️
The beauty of time made visible
The wabi-sabi aesthetic has this quality of making time visible in a beautiful way. Time in itself is invisible, more than invisible, it doesn't actually exist in any objective way. Yet in the world around us and in our bodies we find all these signs of the passage of time.
Time, though it doesn't exist, leaves its mark. Sometimes those marks are scars:
Perhaps you have your own scars? I have a scar from when they took out my appendix, aged 7. As well as numerous tiny ones. The body has an amazing ability to heal itself over time, but then we are back to the question, what is time?
I recently listened to a podcast with Ellen Langer, she studies the relationship between the body and mind, but, as she continually corrects the interviewer, insists there is no body and mind. There is just one thing, one phenomena, bodymind.
She tells us about an experiment where she inflicts a slight wound on the participants. They know that it will take time to heal and are locked away to wait. They have a clock in the room. What the participants didn’t know was that they’d been divided into three groups, one with a slow running clock, one a regular clock time and the last, a speeded up clock. So what happened with the healing process?
When they examined the scars, the people who’d been given the speeded up clocks had healed more. Physically the healing process was further along for the people who merely thought more time had passed!
I digress. Scars show us the passage of time, they’re part of the story of our lives.
The sincerity of our scars
The root of the word sincere, is 'without wax'.
Sine = “without” and Cera = “wax”
Sculptors in Greece and Rome would cover flaws in their work by using wax. So a sincere sculpture was one in which any flaws could be seen. A sincere person is one whose flaws are not covered over. Are we willing to be sincere and show our flaws? Or do we feel they will make us less?
