Mend with wisdom, mend with love. It will mend the earth at the same time ~ Yoko Ono
I use my email inbox as a filing system of sorts: marking things “unread” as means first to tag, then retrieve in another time...
But really, who am I kidding?
My method is a disorganized, quirky habit masquerading as a system only unto me.
Until it isn’t…
And elegies begin to emerge.
Hidden jewels that resurface and reverberate above the daily doomscroll patiently waiting to be revealed.
Such is Yoko Ono’s “Mend Piece,” a work that I became familiar with over a year ago in Improvised Life:
As an exhibition, the viewer is invited to enter a white room with a white table strewn with fragments of broken cups to be mended with scissors and tape, rubber cement, and twine. After mending, the pieces are displayed on white shelves. The viewer becomes the maker, experiencing the art through the process of their participation. “Mend Piece” encourages the viewer to become the participant, to transform broken fragments into objects that both reveal as well as repair the violence of their rupture. The quality of the mender’s touch becomes integral to the making of meaning ~ a silent, collective healing.
The whiteness is not lost on me…
Yoko Ono writes:
“MEND PIECE is a wish piece. You might think you’re just mending a cup, but you’re actually mending something within you. The process of mending is the experience. ”
It’s been almost ten years since I got sober, but in so many ways that time feels reminiscent of where we are now. How does one begin the process of being and doing the things we have always done, but with fresh eyes and an awareness of the work we have never really known?
How I stopped drinking, the steps I took, are for another story, but what I can say, was that the process began a journey, and so too, a gradual return to light.
Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. So too sobriety, for I had to relearn everything. I had to begin again.
Then as now, it began with a series of unseen acts of mending: sewing the many badges on my child’s scouting sash. Running stitches that had come undone under the seam of a collar. The hemming of trousers just slightly too long. A few small repairs.
And slowly, that light and my life became brighter, although I knew not everything that would be illuminated along the way.
Which is how feel again in this spectacular now, and I ask myself: what is it exactly I am mending?
Before the possibility of healing, I must continue to sit with my uncomfortability. Among other things, I must address my white privilege and my complicity, in ways I simply never understood. It’s work I can only assume for myself, and in time in the company of other white bodies, but is not my place to be a leader. I will make mistakes and I will continue to be teachable. I can pick up the shards, and examine how the broken edges might begin to come together…it will be a deliberate work in process, and it is how I will continue to be just so.