Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick
Episode 411: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Haejin Shim & Mako Fujimura, "The Fractures Filled with Gold"
Aug 10, 2026
Season 17
Episode 411
Michael John Cusick
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold — not to hide the damage, but to make the fractures the most beautiful part. Mako Fujimura, one of the world's leading contemporary artists, and his wife Haejin, an attorney and founder of Embers International, have built their lives and work around that image. This conversation is about what it actually looks like to believe it.
Mako talks about his own experience of 9/11 as a Ground Zero resident, and why he sees making — painting, writing, building an organization — as an act of invoking new creation in the middle of darkness. Haejin talks about the women and children her team serves in Mumbai's red light district, and why Kintsugi is the only metaphor honest enough for what restoration means there. They also talk about what the pandemic revealed about who a society actually depends on, why Jesus chose to appear after the resurrection as a wounded human, and what it means that the Kintsugi master doesn't begin mending until he can see beauty in the fragments.
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