Issuu

March 2020

AW AMONG WORLDS

Kintsugi The Art of Repairing the Broken

AMONG WORLDS

MARCH 2020 • VOLUME 20 • NUMBER 2

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ARTICLES

Broken Isn’t Enough

Beth Matheson

From the Director The Art of Repairing the Broken Michael Pollock

Writing Your Kintsugi Jo Parfitt

“It’s only when the straight line breaks and heals a little crooked that you ever see the grace.” Andrew Peterson “We Will Survive” from The Burning Edge of Dawn, 2015

Unpacking My Identity Suitcase Lauren Wells

Kintsugi A Japanese method for repairing broken ceramics with a special lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum

The Power of Sharing Our Story Anisha Abraham

Expanding the Whole Through Brokenness Danielle Pruitt Cummings

Kintsugi As Process Rachel Hicks

Book Review The Storyteller’s Beads Cheryl Skupa

There is No Place Like Home…But Where Would That Be? Emma Arden Farmer

A Cracked Mug— On Loss and Life

TCK Definition An individual who, having spent a significant part of the developmental years in a culture other than the parents’ cultures, while not having full ownership of any. Elements from each culture are incorporated into the life experience, but the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar experience. ~David C. Pollock

Marilyn Gardner

Editor: Rachel Hicks

THE MISSION OF AMONG WORLDS IS TO ENCOURAGE ADULT TCKS AND OTHER GLOBAL NOMADS BY ADDRESSING Graphic Designer: Laurel Fleming REAL NEEDS THROUGH RELEVANT ISSUES, TOPICS, AND Digital Publishing: Bret Taylor RESOURCES. Copy Editor: Riah Solomon

AMONG WORLDS ©2020 (ISSN# 1538-75180) IS PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY INTERACTION INTERNATIONAL, 1516 PECK ST, MUSKEGON, MI 49442 USA. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED WITHOUT THE PRIOR PERMISSION FROM THE PUBLISHER. WE LOVE WORKING WITH INTERNATIONAL SCHOOLS AND NGOS AND WILL NEGOTIATE A RATE THAT WORKS WITHIN YOUR BUDGET. CONTACT US AT AMONGWORLDS@INTERACTIONINTL.ORG OR CALL +1-630-653-8780. PRINTED VERSIONS OF SOME ISSUES MAY BE PURCHASED AT WWW.INTERACTIONINTL.ORG FOR $6 USD PLUS SHIPPING AND HANDLING. CONTACT US REGARDING INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING OR DISCOUNTS WHEN PURCHASING FIVE OR MORE ISSUES. THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN AMONG WORLDS DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEW OF AMONG WORLDS OR INTERACTION INTERNATIONAL.

Letter from the Editor

elcome home, friends. I can say that with confidence to you, our readers, because you—more than most—are able to hold more than one “home” in your hearts. It is our hope that Among Worlds becomes one of your special “homes”—a place where people “get” you, where you don’t have to explain your confusing background, your ambiguous accent, or your “fusion” fashion choices. We hope that in this family your stories will be attended to with interest and that among these pages you will discover long-lost kin. May you feel renewed and strengthened after spending time with us to go back into this glorious world grateful for and proud of your TCK heritage. I am blessed to be a second-generation TCK raising third-generation TCKs. However, this life that I would never trade for another includes some aches and pains that are particular to a globally mobile life. I don’t need to rehash them—you know them well. Sometimes I see my kids struggling with similar things—the ache of long-distance friendships, the hidden-immigrant syndrome of not feeling a sense of belonging in

their “home” country, the restlessness and “itchy feet.” Thank God we can talk about it together—we understand each other in this home, and that goes a long way toward healing. If home is where we are “stitched up” when we break, then this particular issue might do some mending for you. The Japanese art of kintsugi is a gift to the world, being so rich in analogy and metaphor. When a dish or jar breaks, it is carefully pieced back together using a lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum powder. This process highlights the “scars”—it doesn’t hide them. The flaws in each piece are considered a beautiful part of its story, its history. In this issue, you’ll read tales of gratitude for what scars have taught, stories of beauty emerging from brokenness, and advice on how and why we shouldn’t just give up and sit among the broken shards. Danielle Pruitt Cummings shares how devastating circumstances can ultimately lead to a healthy place of reordered identity and priorities. TCK teen Emma Arden Farmer shows us how she’s pieced together her European and American selves in small ways, building bridges along the way. TCK Training Director

Lauren Wells helps us visualize unpacking the “identity suitcase” many of us carry around. And writing mentor and publisher Jo Parfitt coaches us to “write ugly” as a way of processing in the moment our pain and loss. Enjoy these stories and more in this issue. Research tells us that we TCKs experience much more loss, on average, than our peers who are not globally mobile. We can look at our lives and count the cracks. Our hope, though, is that you’ll come to the last page of this issue already beginning to experience the mending you need—and that your life will be all the more beautiful for your golden cracks. Personally, I am honored to have found a “home” at Among Worlds as editor, and I look forward to engaging with my TCK tribe as I hear your stories. So, welcome home to all of us! Love,

R achel

MARCH 2020

FROM THE DIRECTOR

MICHAEL POLLOCK

The Art of Repairing the Broken Michael Pollock, Executive Director of Interaction International

e are, all of us, broken. There is simply no way to walk this journey as human beings and not get dinged, scratched, cracked, dented, and sometimes, shattered. In my 52 trips

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around the sun I have come to understand “healing” as an ongoing process, simply because the battering of life is a constant. Even sleep has been shown to be a healing process from the ravages of the day. “TCKs generally experience more losses before the age of eighteen than most other people experience in their lifetime,” was a quote I grew up hearing from my father, Dave. My own story of losses bears out the truth that repair and healing are possible, and the new ‘vessel’ can be beautiful. When I left the US for Kenya at age eight it did not feel like a breaking—more like the start of a great adventure. However, when our planned six years shrank to three, and ran out, my twelve-year-old self felt smashed. My close friends (local and international), my classmates, teachers, caring adults—I lost them all. The foods I loved—mandazis, irio, getheri, chapatti, nyama choma, chai, and samosa—would be replaced. I would never climb the cedars,

explore the caves, chase game riding in the old LandRover, or play on the white sands of Diani Beach again. We even gave away our dog! In my early thirties there was a shattering time stemming from the death of my beloved older brother, Nate, my name-sake grandfather, and my dad in the short span of three years. There seemed to be shards of me everywhere. What then, brings healing and even beauty to the broken places of our lives? For me as a child there was the connection of family; a crisis in faith that led me to believe deeply that a caring God existed; the reforming of relationships in our new home in Vermont; and the realization over the years that my Kenya-life was not all gone, just changed. New eyes for the rearranged and restored pieces prepared me to say “yes” to taking our family to China on an adventure of our own. That nine-year journey held great draughts of joy, relationships, and life. The “trio-of-loss” years was also the period we left the US for China. The golden repairs took place in the deep love of my life-partner—my wife, Kristen; the presence of my three children; a renewed encounter with the present and living Christ; the powerful impact of the two caring communities that sent us out and received us in. Along the way I have benefitted greatly from wise guides: counselors, spiritual directors, mentors, and therapists who have affirmed my work towards wholeness. I accept that after those losses I will never be the same. Full stop. AND also I am able to embrace an ongoing process and marvel at the unique beauty created in the repairing process. Ultimately, I am grateful, even for the pain. Here at Interaction we hold firmly to hope in healing and to the belief that brokenness can be a pathway to beauty. #KintsugiLife

Nothing is ever truly broken—that’s the philosophy behind the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi, which repairs smashed pottery by using beautiful seams of gold.

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Broken Isnâ€™t En

By Beth Ma

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nough

atheson

let the plates fall—first a dusky blue one, and then spring green with a golden rim, followed by black-speckled crimson, cream and lavender, and dark cocoa brown. They made a pretty mess on the concrete patio until I swept up the pieces and stashed them on the top kitchen shelf. Our coffee table, roughly crafted from a local Papua New Guinean hardwood, was begging to be brightened with a ceramic mosaic, and now all I needed was a little glue and grout. But a few weeks later a difficult experience rocked our family, leading to our return to the US for counseling. We never went back. Those plates were a good metaphor for my heart, I realized as I sorted through our crisis and tried to make sense of yet another goodbye I didn’t choose. Broken pieces of myself had stayed behind when I unexpectedly left my childhood home in the southern Philippines, some got lost in my move from Ohio to North Carolina, and unnumbered shards were covered in deep Kentucky clay the day we buried my mom. And now some of my shattered bits, mingled with portions of my husband’s and kids’ hurting hearts, lay like they had been forgotten in the emerald highlands of the South Pacific. What do you do when you try to put your heart back together, only to realize some fragments are gone for good? Living among worlds, stretched across cultures and continents, is rich and beautiful—but it also leaves us torn and scattered. Brokenness is inevitable in the TCK life (and life in general), as people and places lay claim to sections of our MARCH 2020

memories, whether we gave them willingly or they were taken by force. The reality of brokenness has become a socially acceptable—and even trendy— topic of conversation, with increasingly public discussions of mental health struggles, addictions, trauma, and abuse. And that’s wonderful! The freedom to talk about formerly hidden things has been a long time coming, especially in missions circles. For too many of us, though, the conversation doesn’t just begin with admitting the brokenness in our stories; that’s also where it ends. I often hear resignation and cynicism in exchanges between grown TCKs as they compare the losses, traumas, and wounds they’ve collected over the years. We do need those safe spaces to share the heartaches and questions only other global nomads are likely to grasp, where we can talk about struggles while they’re still in process. And I understand the temptation to give up reaching for wholeness with so many pieces of our hearts missing. Healing is hard, painful, exhausting work. So why should we pursue health? Why isn’t airing our brokenness enough? In my own fight for wholeness, I’ve found three major reasons to keep going: Brokenness creates more brokenness. My most profound wounds haven’t happened as a result of life circumstances. Yes, the transitions and goodbyes that were no one’s fault have been extremely painful, but I’ve been most broken by encounters with other people’s hidden, fractured edges—and, if I’m honest, my own shards, too. Loose, razor-edged pieces rattle around, damaging whatever they come in contact with and leaving casualties wherever they go. We have a 8

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responsibility to ourselves and the people around us to examine every fragment we still own, no matter who broke it, and figure out where it belongs. We’re far too valuable to be left in pieces on the top shelf. I believe that our Creator made us to reflect who he is and that we matter to him. Psalm 139, sometimes called the TCK psalm, describes this truth beautifully: You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. You know what I am going to say, even before I say it, LORD. You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head… You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. (Psalm 139:3–5, 13–14, New Living Translation)

Broken pieces of myself had stayed behind when I unexpectedly left my childhood home in the southern Philippines, some got lost in my move from Ohio to North Carolina, and unnumbered shards were covered in deep Kentucky clay the day we buried my mom.

God not only values us enough that he former shape when whole chunks of our hearts are simply gone? shaped us with care and purpose, but he We can’t. also pays tender attention to every detail We will never again look the way we of our days. If the most powerful being in the universe prizes us that much, we’re did before our breaking. Because we’re not supposed to. worth the effort it takes to seek wholeness. Before, we were regular old dishes. Healing is possible! I know that Now we’re becoming stunning works of TCKs represent a wide spectrum of art, skillfully mended and filled—not beliefs, but I can’t legitimately talk about with simple gold, like kintsugi pieces— moving from brokenness to wholeness but with God himself. As we let him without bringing my faith into it. The work in us, he pours his glory into all our Bible is the truest, most solid thing I gaps, bringing us an entirely new kind of know, so I believe what the prophet Isaiah wholeness. foretold about Jesus: No, we’ll never be the same. But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed (Isaiah 53:5, NLT). Jesus submitted himself to brokenness so he could ultimately break its power completely, setting us free to find healing through a relationship with him. What about those missing pieces, though? How can we be restored to our

Beth Matheson rocked culottes and a bowl cut during her childhood in the Philippines. She and her husband, Mike, have served since 2004 with Wycliffe Bible Translators, providing care and training for missionaries and their families in the US and Papua New Guinea. Beth is now a writer and podcast host for Wycliffe Women of the Word. https://www.wycliffe.org/women; https://www.rootsdowndeep.com

MARCH 2020

Writing Your Kintsugi By Jo Parfitt

his time last year, I was preparing for my opening keynote at the Families in Global Transition (FIGT) conference. I had been asked to speak on the subject of connecting, and as a writer of books, article, poetry, and blogs, I knew I would speak about writing. Specifically, I would talk about how writing and sharing our stories connect us. Stories connect us to our inner selves and they connect us to other people. Interestingly, it was the metaphor of the kintsugi that first inspired my keynote. I loved how it showed that something broken became more precious when glued back together. It was not long before I realized that if each of the 10

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fragments of the Japanese porcelain item represented one of our stories, then the golden glue used to stick it back together was the sharing of those stories. It was not lost on me that the term pieces means a “piece of writing.”

affected the entire family was in no doubt. And yet, through those emails we developed a friendship and a knowledge of each other’s souls, deeper than could ever have been forged had we reserved our communication for the rare times we were in the same country and could meet face Sharing Is Caring to face. A couple of years earlier I had co-auIt was a learning for us both, but more thored and published a book with Terry than anything we realized the immense Anne Wilson called Monday Morning benefits of feeling able to share our stories Emails. In short, Terry Anne and I wrote and bare our souls in a safe space. We each other emails every week, writing discovered that each time we recounted candidly and with more than a little a sorry tale in writing, the act of writing vulnerability about our experiences overwas a therapy in itself. Negative emotions seas. We particularly focused on the effect reduced, immediately on that first writing that our decades abroad had had on our and then further each time that story was shared. We were intrigued, and I took it upon myself to see what research, if any, was out there. I discovered that in 2012, Brigham University conducted five studies into the effect sharing, verbally and in diary form, had on happiness. The studies concluded that writing about positive events boosts mood and that the subsequent sharing of the story increases that effect further. Both writing and speaking one’s stories have an enduring effect on the writer. Writing Ugly As a writing mentor and teacher, I have long extolled the benefits of writing five ATCKs, now in their twenties. In our about negative experiences—those expebook we shared openly about the mental riences that may threaten to break us, health and career challenges our sons had or at least cause a few cracks—and am a encountered and the very different ways firm believer in the value of writing when we had both chosen to help them through you are “bleeding.” I recommend writing the mire—me with counselling, therapy, freely and without fear of being read or and research; she with instinct and a judged about whatever is on your mind. mother’s love. That our choice to bring This is no time for perfectionism. It’s time children up overseas in several locations to write ugly. Sure, later, when some time MARCH 2020

Expanding the Whole Through Brokenness By Danielle Pruit Cummings

hen something breaks and is pieced back together, the story of the breaking becomes inherent to the object. The item is no longer only what it first was; it is also its mended, expanded version of wholeness. A main fissure that helped my wholeness expand was becoming acquainted with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). While certainly relevant and part of the national conversation in my passport country, the United States—which at the time involved headlines of Magic Johnson’s announcement and increasing awareness of LGBTQ+ healthcare needs— I as a sheltered thirteen-year-old was not savvy to the accelerating research and public stigma around that virus nor any other virus. That is, until my parents, brother, and I moved to Nairobi, Kenya. In accordance with my adolescent sense of invincibility, and removed from the moral-political contamination of

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emerging information in the States, HIV did not scare me. My mom was a registered nurse, and learning about the existence of HIV in Kenya was about as loaded as learning about the British word for grocery cart (trolley); I did not have an emotional value attached to the existence of a disease. Sometimes naivety is also liberation. In rapid succession, I learned about HIV—its existence, its prevalence, and then, its face. The last one broke me. Without treatment, 25 percent of babies born to HIV-positive mothers contract the virus. In other words, before today’s treatment options were discovered or circulated, at least three out of four babies were facing a typical HIV-negative lifespan without the presence of their mother. At that time, in the late nineties, I was told that the rate at which Kenyans were dying of HIV/AIDS was equivalent to a 747 plane going down each day: was

She embodies the concept that Japanese kintsugi artists practiceâ€Ś It neither defines the thing nor ruins the thing; it helps it become.

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Kintsugi As Process Y

By Rachel Hicks

ou’re processing a whole life, aren’t you?” It was early summer, 2013, and my family and I were attending a one-week “debrief and renewal” experience for returning missionaries, hosted by MTI in Colorado. I was sitting in a comfortable chair in a quiet room. Everyone around me was busy writing. I was frozen—from the over-airconditioned room (why, Americans?) and from being overwhelmed at where to even start. Most people in the room were TCAs: third-culture adults (entirely different than adult TCKs; TCAs grew up in their passport countries and first lived abroad as adults). They were writing down reflections about how their time overseas had changed them. Our intuitive presenter/counselor/guide must have noticed how stuck I was. She knew I was a TCK. She came alongside me and whispered those words to me— You’re processing a whole life, aren’t you?

MARCH 2020

Where Will Among Worlds Take You? Among Worlds magazine is accepting submissions for upcoming issues. We are looking for original, high quality writing, poetry, photography, and visual pieces. We invite writers, poets, and artists to submit their work for consideration.

June 2020

Journeys: From Here to There and Back Again Submission deadline: April 30, 2020

September 2020

Releasing: Living Fully and Letting Go Submission deadline: July 30, 2020