March 15, 2017 • 18 mins
No matter where you fall on the political spectrum we can all agree that more than ever, the world feels broken. In this episode, we take a trip to Washington DC on the day of the inauguration and the eve of the Women’s March. And we look to Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken things, to find out how to mend ourselves.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
In the early morning hours of July two thousand and sixteen.
I woke up. I knew something was wrong, something had broken.
I was thirty six weeks pregnant, and I woke up.
I woke up a few hours later. I was flat
(00:26):
on my back under tungsten lighting as a team of
eight people cross checked each other as if preparing to
take flight, noting the time, confirming my name and age.
And then my daughter was cut out of me and
whisked to a table, a crowd of busy hands working
over her. You'd think it would be hard to read
(00:49):
someone's face if it were obscured by a medical mask,
but it's not. The eyes tell you everything you need
to know. The nurses eyes, the doctor's eyes, the an
enthusiologists eyes, the technicians. They all told me something was
very wrong, maybe even broken. This is the stuff of life,
(01:18):
and I'm your host, Julie Douglas. In this episode, we
take a hard look at what it is to be broken.
My daughter was hypoxic. The umbilical cord had nearly strangled
the life out of her. She had what the neurologist
(01:40):
called a significant insult to her brain. And though I
wouldn't know it until later she had sustained a serious
hearing loss. I was devastated. I felt like I had
failed her, like my body had broken her. It was
like being inside of a nightmare you couldn't wake from. Yeah.
(02:02):
For many nights after she was born, I dreamed she
was in my arms and then gone. I would wake frantic,
tearing the pillows and sheets of the bed, looking for her,
calling out to her, until I saw her sleeping peacefully
in the bassinet. I was awake, and I was broken.
(02:26):
Since then, I've come to understand that we are all
broken in one way or another, and that most human
made things are too. Our ideas are broken, our systems
are broken, our governments, and in this way, the personal
is the political. No matter what perspective we're coming from,
(02:46):
we can all agree that the United States is broken.
But we've been here before. Time. It would seem it's
circular guide in our newsroom has been an attempt said,
perhaps you know now on the light for President's or
to be desimental to your safe is to continue this market.
I'm saying that this is an unlawful astamy. You have
(03:07):
to disperse your heartest at disperse go home. I'll go
to you a church this march will not content. Well,
come on seng Man, Uncle Samy to health again, godham
self and it's terrible jam down nd N. Now, so
(03:30):
we're start a third highest medal in the country. It
doesn't mean anything. I gotta silver Star, Purple Hearts, Army
Conversation Medal, eight Air Metal, National Defense and the rest
of this garbage. It doesn't mean a face. And that
we are living in a time when political fault lines
are fracturing. Society is now very apparent. Inauguration, NDR, you
(03:57):
can hear the what do you want to do in
the back round? Another thing, all that for all of
that exists, all of that opposition. Donald J. Trump is
now president at the United States. Can you explain your
emotions to me, citizens of America, explain your emotions to
(04:17):
There's just no way there's like just snow to build,
no way to even comprehend with this means like this
very for me, This earl moment is like like within
a cell. It's like in the world the dark and
the light are so tight right now at this moment,
it's we will face there's so much potential, will get
(04:44):
the job done for beauty and for devastated, and this
is one moment. It's so much incomprehensible that they can
exist right now, so and we are grateful, so good
(05:07):
to explore this fracture. Podcast host Holly Fry, producer Noel Brown,
and myself packed up our things and headed to d
C on the day of President Trump's inauguration to attend
the Women's March. The next day, the sun was just
(05:28):
starting to set and the streets were nearly empty. But
the closer we got to the White House, the more
we saw signs like dump Trump and crowds of people thickening.
We turned onto f Street and were met with a
wave of smoke. Got away from the don't breath ahead,
a crush of people gathered around an overturned newspaper box,
(05:50):
It's metal frame warping under the fire it was engulfed in.
Nearby police in full riot gear kept their shields up,
and just one block from the smoke a National Guard
and hovering helicopters. The streets were again empty. Occasionally couples
dressed in ballgowns and tuxedos emerged from their hotels to
attend inauguration festivities. This is where we met Dan. He
(06:15):
was holding a U. S flag, his young son standing
protectively nearby, riding the flag when it neared the ground.
We're here because this is probably the greatest president in
our lifetime, where you're celebrated, and because my daughter had
the privilege march in the break. Earlier we met Shine,
she was selling buttons with sentiments like not my president
(06:39):
in the world. The people why you will or might
be lace? They have mace gowns them with something that's
maceca tie were I Shine and Dan's moods were very different.
W if you're wig because we're gonna return to the
(07:01):
constitutional status where people can work to be free, where
they can work for merit, where they can work for
their future. And I honestly believe we're in the rising
tide that will lift all boats if you let it.
I don't feel like that they I don't know what
everybody's feeling, but I feel like there's a certain move.
It's like you get in an uncomfortable situation and you
(07:24):
have to your force to either accept that situation or
you can you can't. It's like if you have broken legs,
you can't walk, but you eventually realize, Okay, my legs
are being repaired right now. I'm in a healing process.
(07:48):
We asked Dan about empathy about people who are marginalized,
for whom the playing fields aren't leveled. Most of us
see individuals as individuals, but we see groups as pushing
us back. I will take care of any individual of
any nature, any religion, any any sexual orientation as an
individual with truly, with with love. I don't feel that difference.
(08:09):
Any one of you guys needed something, I would do
it right now. I don't know who you are, I would,
I would do what I can to help you. But
you also have to understand that nobody has a requirement
to be nice to anybody. We want to help people
be nice, but you're not entitled to that. You have
to make that happen. And I feel there's at least
as much racism against as a white person these days
(08:33):
in terms of looking at skin color and reacting. Whereas
I'm searching when I see other people for a commonality,
I want to I want to find that threat, and
as soon as I find that thread, it's all good.
And if you talk to anybody who's felt that way
about some people, it's all to seek out the other people.
(08:55):
There was a lot of conflict on the day of
the inoperation between attendees and protesters, but Seine made a
conscious choice where I saw anger, I gave a hug
um and just sort of like, we could do this.
You know, I'm ready to move forward. I don't have
no choice. I can't go back, I can't stand here.
(09:18):
I choose to go fullard. Everybody's just gotta be responsive
to the situation, move forward and take it for what
it is worth and watch it back. So we're there
any commonalities for Dan anything he could agree with? Well,
(09:41):
that's hard, hard question answer, Um, what do you like? Okay?
I I walked up to a protester who commented on
my hat right away. As right after the tear guests
went off at the beat up in the Starbucks, where
most millennials hang out more than anybody the rest of us.
I don't know why they picked Starbucks to damage, but
there was dear gas, there was glass, and right afterwards,
young man about said don't go in there unless you
(10:03):
want to get tear gassed. And I asked him, I said,
what what, What's what's the issue? And he says healthcare.
And that's when I come up with I realized. I said,
but you know the government doesn't give you healthcare. People
get healthcare and he said, well, we wanted for free.
And I said, well, good luck with that. He said, well,
we're fighting hard for that. Go to work and fight hard.
So I don't agree with what the demands that I've
been hearing. I haven't heard demands in the post election
(10:25):
cycle that I can agree with, and that's unfortunate. But
I'm searching for that. Maybe you could give me a
point of view that you think might cross the aisle
about anything, anything you've heard today that you think somebody
you say you identified. I want to be empathetic with
that challenge. I mean, honestly, from what I have heard
(10:50):
from people who are quote unquote liberals is that they're
actually just seeing this as an opportunity to try to
band together. So he is the president. We do need
to move forward, So where do we go from here?
Like your legs are broken, now, you know it's a
(11:10):
healing process. They're animal, So what you do is inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.
(11:32):
Your friend who is a reiki from Woodstock, New York,
who is you know, very and he's taught me things.
He's taught me as an orth beat, as many things
that I use in my daily life, breathing for instance, Okay,
wonderful thought we can share that we can grow with that. Um.
He's praying for peace, but he's afraid of what Donald
Trump would mean as far as that's concerned. And I said,
(11:54):
I'm praying for the for peace too, but in the
opportunities allow us to live our lives. And I say,
what if, just maybe your prayers are answered in a
way you didn't expect me. And I think that we
have a chance for the future. For Dan, everything up
until this part has been broken, and there's a promise
(12:17):
of making his worldview whole. For Shine, she's just beginning
to see the fractures. You might think that these two
perspectives are like fragments from a broken bowl, never to
be returned to the whole again. But it turns out
that something can be broken and fixed at the same time,
and in the process made stronger. A lump of clay
(12:47):
on a spinning wheel changes shape. It rises up as
the potter intervenes with her hands, and by degrees the
form of a bowl emerges. It's then fired glazed, refired,
and finally the bowl is the illusion of symmetry perfection.
(13:10):
The bull falls, hits the ground, cracks open. Kintsugi is
the Japanese art of broken pottery, the philosophy of which
tells us that a shattered bull isn't broken, but simply scattered.
It's true potential only now revealed. The shards are fused
(13:34):
together with gold, and the cracks clow like gilded veins.
In a Japanese parable, it is said that the bowl
has become more beautiful for having been broken. The true
life of the bull began the moment it fell. We
know this story, albeit in a different form. We call
(13:56):
it the Fall, and in it Adam and Eve live
in Paradise, place where everything is perfect and nothing happens.
In Rebecca soln It's book Hope in the Dark, she
writes that quote, Paradise does not require of us courage, selflessness, creativity, passion.
She notes that quote some imaginative Christian heretics worshiped Eve
(14:18):
for having liberated us from Paradise the myth of the
fortunate Fall. The heretics recognized that before the fall, we
were not yet fully human. In Paradise, Adam and Eve
need not wrestle with morality, creation, with society, with mortality.
They only realize their own humanity and the struggle and
(14:39):
imperfect world invites. In the early morning hours of July fifteen,
(15:01):
two thousand and sixteen, I knew something was wrong, something
had broken. I was thirty six weeks pregnant, and I
woke up. I wasn't sure exactly what was wrong, but
I silently pled to my unborn daughter to hold on
(15:22):
to live. I swear, I said that life is beautiful.
I swear it's worth it. I woke up later in
the operating room, with hands working over her tiny body.
My daughter finally took her first breath. Today, I look
(15:44):
at her, and I see a kind of kintsugi at work,
the mosaic of people and systems that stitched together her existence.
And I see these same forces at work and binding
us all together, because life truly begins once we realize
it's broken. In Season two of the Stuff of Life,
(16:38):
the personal is the political, and we follow the cracks
in it all, starting with anger and hate, and then
the miracle of empty and compassion and wiring us all
together in this great, big, broken world of ours. Sometimes
anger is an entirely appropriate response to mistreatment, and it's
(16:58):
our own anger is a signal to our felt that
we need to take better care of ourselves. The sup
of Life is written and executive produced by me and
Julie Douglas and co produced by Noel Brown. Interviews in
this episode were conducted by Noel Brown and Holly Fry.
Original music is by Noel Brown. This episode also featured
(17:19):
music by Tristan McNeil and Dylan Fagan, and editorial oversight
is provided by contributing producer Dylan Fagan and Head of
production Jerry Rowland. We'd like to hear from you. We'd
like to hear your stories and your thoughts and you
can share them with us on our total free calling
number that's one eight four four hs W stuff
In the early morning hours of July two thousand and sixteen.
I woke up. I knew something was wrong, something had broken.
I was thirty six weeks pregnant, and I woke up.
I woke up a few hours later. I was flat
(00:26):
on my back under tungsten lighting as a team of
eight people cross checked each other as if preparing to
take flight, noting the time, confirming my name and age.
And then my daughter was cut out of me and
whisked to a table, a crowd of busy hands working
over her. You'd think it would be hard to read
(00:49):
someone's face if it were obscured by a medical mask,
but it's not. The eyes tell you everything you need
to know. The nurses eyes, the doctor's eyes, the an
enthusiologists eyes, the technicians. They all told me something was
very wrong, maybe even broken. This is the stuff of life,
(01:18):
and I'm your host, Julie Douglas. In this episode, we
take a hard look at what it is to be broken.
My daughter was hypoxic. The umbilical cord had nearly strangled
the life out of her. She had what the neurologist
(01:40):
called a significant insult to her brain. And though I
wouldn't know it until later she had sustained a serious
hearing loss. I was devastated. I felt like I had
failed her, like my body had broken her. It was
like being inside of a nightmare you couldn't wake from. Yeah.
(02:02):
For many nights after she was born, I dreamed she
was in my arms and then gone. I would wake frantic,
tearing the pillows and sheets of the bed, looking for her,
calling out to her, until I saw her sleeping peacefully
in the bassinet. I was awake, and I was broken.
(02:26):
Since then, I've come to understand that we are all
broken in one way or another, and that most human
made things are too. Our ideas are broken, our systems
are broken, our governments, and in this way, the personal
is the political. No matter what perspective we're coming from,
(02:46):
we can all agree that the United States is broken.
But we've been here before. Time. It would seem it's
circular guide in our newsroom has been an attempt said,
perhaps you know now on the light for President's or
to be desimental to your safe is to continue this market.
I'm saying that this is an unlawful astamy. You have
(03:07):
to disperse your heartest at disperse go home. I'll go
to you a church this march will not content. Well,
come on seng Man, Uncle Samy to health again, godham
self and it's terrible jam down nd N. Now, so
(03:30):
we're start a third highest medal in the country. It
doesn't mean anything. I gotta silver Star, Purple Hearts, Army
Conversation Medal, eight Air Metal, National Defense and the rest
of this garbage. It doesn't mean a face. And that
we are living in a time when political fault lines
are fracturing. Society is now very apparent. Inauguration, NDR, you
(03:57):
can hear the what do you want to do in
the back round? Another thing, all that for all of
that exists, all of that opposition. Donald J. Trump is
now president at the United States. Can you explain your
emotions to me, citizens of America, explain your emotions to
(04:17):
There's just no way there's like just snow to build,
no way to even comprehend with this means like this
very for me, This earl moment is like like within
a cell. It's like in the world the dark and
the light are so tight right now at this moment,
it's we will face there's so much potential, will get
(04:44):
the job done for beauty and for devastated, and this
is one moment. It's so much incomprehensible that they can
exist right now, so and we are grateful, so good
(05:07):
to explore this fracture. Podcast host Holly Fry, producer Noel Brown,
and myself packed up our things and headed to d
C on the day of President Trump's inauguration to attend
the Women's March. The next day, the sun was just
(05:28):
starting to set and the streets were nearly empty. But
the closer we got to the White House, the more
we saw signs like dump Trump and crowds of people thickening.
We turned onto f Street and were met with a
wave of smoke. Got away from the don't breath ahead,
a crush of people gathered around an overturned newspaper box,
(05:50):
It's metal frame warping under the fire it was engulfed in.
Nearby police in full riot gear kept their shields up,
and just one block from the smoke a National Guard
and hovering helicopters. The streets were again empty. Occasionally couples
dressed in ballgowns and tuxedos emerged from their hotels to
attend inauguration festivities. This is where we met Dan. He
(06:15):
was holding a U. S flag, his young son standing
protectively nearby, riding the flag when it neared the ground.
We're here because this is probably the greatest president in
our lifetime, where you're celebrated, and because my daughter had
the privilege march in the break. Earlier we met Shine,
she was selling buttons with sentiments like not my president
(06:39):
in the world. The people why you will or might
be lace? They have mace gowns them with something that's
maceca tie were I Shine and Dan's moods were very different.
W if you're wig because we're gonna return to the
(07:01):
constitutional status where people can work to be free, where
they can work for merit, where they can work for
their future. And I honestly believe we're in the rising
tide that will lift all boats if you let it.
I don't feel like that they I don't know what
everybody's feeling, but I feel like there's a certain move.
It's like you get in an uncomfortable situation and you
(07:24):
have to your force to either accept that situation or
you can you can't. It's like if you have broken legs,
you can't walk, but you eventually realize, Okay, my legs
are being repaired right now. I'm in a healing process.
(07:48):
We asked Dan about empathy about people who are marginalized,
for whom the playing fields aren't leveled. Most of us
see individuals as individuals, but we see groups as pushing
us back. I will take care of any individual of
any nature, any religion, any any sexual orientation as an
individual with truly, with with love. I don't feel that difference.
(08:09):
Any one of you guys needed something, I would do
it right now. I don't know who you are, I would,
I would do what I can to help you. But
you also have to understand that nobody has a requirement
to be nice to anybody. We want to help people
be nice, but you're not entitled to that. You have
to make that happen. And I feel there's at least
as much racism against as a white person these days
(08:33):
in terms of looking at skin color and reacting. Whereas
I'm searching when I see other people for a commonality,
I want to I want to find that threat, and
as soon as I find that thread, it's all good.
And if you talk to anybody who's felt that way
about some people, it's all to seek out the other people.
(08:55):
There was a lot of conflict on the day of
the inoperation between attendees and protesters, but Seine made a
conscious choice where I saw anger, I gave a hug
um and just sort of like, we could do this.
You know, I'm ready to move forward. I don't have
no choice. I can't go back, I can't stand here.
(09:18):
I choose to go fullard. Everybody's just gotta be responsive
to the situation, move forward and take it for what
it is worth and watch it back. So we're there
any commonalities for Dan anything he could agree with? Well,
(09:41):
that's hard, hard question answer, Um, what do you like? Okay?
I I walked up to a protester who commented on
my hat right away. As right after the tear guests
went off at the beat up in the Starbucks, where
most millennials hang out more than anybody the rest of us.
I don't know why they picked Starbucks to damage, but
there was dear gas, there was glass, and right afterwards,
young man about said don't go in there unless you
(10:03):
want to get tear gassed. And I asked him, I said,
what what, What's what's the issue? And he says healthcare.
And that's when I come up with I realized. I said,
but you know the government doesn't give you healthcare. People
get healthcare and he said, well, we wanted for free.
And I said, well, good luck with that. He said, well,
we're fighting hard for that. Go to work and fight hard.
So I don't agree with what the demands that I've
been hearing. I haven't heard demands in the post election
(10:25):
cycle that I can agree with, and that's unfortunate. But
I'm searching for that. Maybe you could give me a
point of view that you think might cross the aisle
about anything, anything you've heard today that you think somebody
you say you identified. I want to be empathetic with
that challenge. I mean, honestly, from what I have heard
(10:50):
from people who are quote unquote liberals is that they're
actually just seeing this as an opportunity to try to
band together. So he is the president. We do need
to move forward, So where do we go from here?
Like your legs are broken, now, you know it's a
(11:10):
healing process. They're animal, So what you do is inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.
(11:32):
Your friend who is a reiki from Woodstock, New York,
who is you know, very and he's taught me things.
He's taught me as an orth beat, as many things
that I use in my daily life, breathing for instance, Okay,
wonderful thought we can share that we can grow with that. Um.
He's praying for peace, but he's afraid of what Donald
Trump would mean as far as that's concerned. And I said,
(11:54):
I'm praying for the for peace too, but in the
opportunities allow us to live our lives. And I say,
what if, just maybe your prayers are answered in a
way you didn't expect me. And I think that we
have a chance for the future. For Dan, everything up
until this part has been broken, and there's a promise
(12:17):
of making his worldview whole. For Shine, she's just beginning
to see the fractures. You might think that these two
perspectives are like fragments from a broken bowl, never to
be returned to the whole again. But it turns out
that something can be broken and fixed at the same time,
and in the process made stronger. A lump of clay
(12:47):
on a spinning wheel changes shape. It rises up as
the potter intervenes with her hands, and by degrees the
form of a bowl emerges. It's then fired glazed, refired,
and finally the bowl is the illusion of symmetry perfection.
(13:10):
The bull falls, hits the ground, cracks open. Kintsugi is
the Japanese art of broken pottery, the philosophy of which
tells us that a shattered bull isn't broken, but simply scattered.
It's true potential only now revealed. The shards are fused
(13:34):
together with gold, and the cracks clow like gilded veins.
In a Japanese parable, it is said that the bowl
has become more beautiful for having been broken. The true
life of the bull began the moment it fell. We
know this story, albeit in a different form. We call
(13:56):
it the Fall, and in it Adam and Eve live
in Paradise, place where everything is perfect and nothing happens.
In Rebecca soln It's book Hope in the Dark, she
writes that quote, Paradise does not require of us courage, selflessness, creativity, passion.
She notes that quote some imaginative Christian heretics worshiped Eve
(14:18):
for having liberated us from Paradise the myth of the
fortunate Fall. The heretics recognized that before the fall, we
were not yet fully human. In Paradise, Adam and Eve
need not wrestle with morality, creation, with society, with mortality.
They only realize their own humanity and the struggle and
(14:39):
imperfect world invites. In the early morning hours of July fifteen,
(15:01):
two thousand and sixteen, I knew something was wrong, something
had broken. I was thirty six weeks pregnant, and I
woke up. I wasn't sure exactly what was wrong, but
I silently pled to my unborn daughter to hold on
(15:22):
to live. I swear, I said that life is beautiful.
I swear it's worth it. I woke up later in
the operating room, with hands working over her tiny body.
My daughter finally took her first breath. Today, I look
(15:44):
at her, and I see a kind of kintsugi at work,
the mosaic of people and systems that stitched together her existence.
And I see these same forces at work and binding
us all together, because life truly begins once we realize
it's broken. In Season two of the Stuff of Life,
(16:38):
the personal is the political, and we follow the cracks
in it all, starting with anger and hate, and then
the miracle of empty and compassion and wiring us all
together in this great, big, broken world of ours. Sometimes
anger is an entirely appropriate response to mistreatment, and it's
(16:58):
our own anger is a signal to our felt that
we need to take better care of ourselves. The sup
of Life is written and executive produced by me and
Julie Douglas and co produced by Noel Brown. Interviews in
this episode were conducted by Noel Brown and Holly Fry.
Original music is by Noel Brown. This episode also featured
(17:19):
music by Tristan McNeil and Dylan Fagan, and editorial oversight
is provided by contributing producer Dylan Fagan and Head of
production Jerry Rowland. We'd like to hear from you. We'd
like to hear your stories and your thoughts and you
can share them with us on our total free calling
number that's one eight four four hs W stuff
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