Tied Together
Snow, Repair, and the Art of Mending
Winter met me first in motion.
Snow in New York. Snow again in Chicago. The quiet kind that doesn’t announce itself loudly, but changes how you walk, how you pause, how carefully you hold what’s in front of you.
In Chicago, I found myself standing in front of an offering: broken porcelain pieces. Glue. Tape. Yarn.
An invitation to create. To repair. To heal.
“Mend Piece” by Yoko Ono: Mend with wisdom, mend with love. It will mend the earth at the same time.
Against the backdrop of an icy Lake Michigan, I sat down with “Mend Piece” by Yoko Ono. I held fragments in my hands — edges sharp, histories unknown — and wrapped them together slowly with yarn. No rushing. No perfection. Just attention. As my fingers moved, I felt the words of my tattoo along my side surface gently in my body: “Tied together.”
I got that tattoo a few days before I moved to Cambridge for graduate school, alongside my best friend. It came from a poem that named our friendship and that season of young adulthood with aching accuracy: “Tied together by things too difficult to explain to someone new.” - Brian Andreas
At the time, the words felt like a promise.
A tether.
A sacred shorthand.
More than a decade later, our friendship would end.
Not with a rupture loud enough to point to, but with a slow unpatterning. A disappearance. A softening at the edges until the shape we once held together no longer existed in the same way.
Holding the porcelain, I realized something winter has been teaching me: Not everything that breaks needs to return to its original form. Not every repair is about restoration. Some mending is about honoring what was, without forcing it to be what is.
The yarn did not hide the cracks. It made them visible. It said: this broke, and it is still worthy of care.
In this season of winter, may I let myself move slowly through memory, through cities, through grief that no longer asks to be named loudly — only held honestly.
May I learn to rest inside the act of mending.
To stay with what feels tender.
To let winter be a collaborator, not a condition to overcome.
Stillness Practice: Hold something broken (literal or remembered) and ask: What would care look like if I didn’t need this to be whole again?
