The other night before falling asleep I had a thought – no, more like a nagging question – that tempted me to turn the light back on and inquire of my friend Professor Google. But I resisted the temptation, figuring if it were important enough I’d remember it in the morning. Which I did. 

This was the burning question:  “What,” I asked Prof. Google, “is the name of the Japanese art form of repairing broken pottery with gold?”  Perhaps everyone knows this. But I couldn’t remember, and I needed a refresher. 

It’s Kintsugi, I learned, which in Japanese means “golden joinery.” It’s “the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with urushi lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum…. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.”

As if part of me was aching for a new, New Year’s Resolution – in addition to my annual list of admonitions: Learn Spanish! and Practice watercolor painting! —  I felt I’d just found it: Make a point, this coming new year, of taking worn or broken things and making art out of them. Do this in every possible sphere, on every conceivable level  — concrete and abstract; physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. 

This, I know, is a tall order.

But it’s not a foreign concept to me. I remember so clearly that my mother used to make sock dolls for my sisters and me when we were little kids and she couldn’t afford to buy dolls for us at a toy store. These sock dolls were one-of-a-kind, works of art (I thought), made from, yes, our big brother’s old gym socks, with embroidered smiles and happy eyes, braided yarn hair, and dresses made from scraps of fabric she’d used to make our clothes. 

“Anyone can buy things,” she’d say haughtily, flipping the script to make us feel special, “but we can make things. That’s even better!” The golden thread of her creative efforts was the sense of specialness she gave us.

Much later, in my fifties, when I taught patchwork quilting at a women’s sewing center in Segou, Mali, West Africa, as an economic development project, I found myself similarly motivated. The Malian women in my classes were poor by American standards but rich in creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. And in Segou, where much of the country’s cotton fabric was manufactured, free scraps of quilt-suitable fabric were in abundance. 

Early on in my years in Segou, to my surprise, these women had asked me to teach them patchwork quilting. I’d never been a quilter, but I accepted the challenge. The first, amateurish, wall quilt I made as a demo for them is still very much in my life, more than twenty-five years later, hanging in my spare room here in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, as a reminder of that experience:

As I wrote in my Mali memoir, HOW TO MAKE AN AFRICAN QUILT, “I worked on this new wall quilt every night in my study, while listening to French language tapes. The tiny, precise quilting stitches taught me patience, as life in Africa in general teaches patience.

“Hand quilting, I soon discovered, is far more than mere sewing. It’s a story, a statement, a commitment, a legacy. Making a quilt is actively committing to life, one small, breath-like stitch at a time.”

More recently, when I finally accepted the fact that my beloved, favorite, ten-year-old, worn-out jeans had really, really had it, and I had to, sadly, part with them, I salvaged the back pockets and made a phone pouch of them. A souvenir of the jeans that had traveled so far with me:

These are simple, homely, hand-sewn examples, I know. But the idea, like a pebble thrown far into a pond, can radiate outward. So much in our current, crazy world seems irredeemably broken (Democracy? Decency?…), which has led me – and perhaps you, too — to a sense of broken-heartedness. 

But maybe, just maybe, with some creative effort, we can find ways to take the broken, torn, or worn pieces and (metaphorically, at least) glue or sew them back together into something unexpectedly beautiful and new. 

So this is my resolution for 2026: repair, repurpose, reuse, revive, renew. Will you join me?