I'm breaking up.
A broken piece of pottery teaches me that the story isn't over yet.
Hi. I’m Katie. This newsletter is a place for the woo curious to explore spirituality, culture, and humanity in an intersectional way. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week…
My marriage ended quietly. So quietly that I’m not sure what day it actually died.
There was no red-faced screaming match. No thrown plates that shattered against the blank walls of the house we never should have bought. The last months I spent with my ex husband were a silent film, scenes rendered in black and white where we pretended like nothing was wrong. He still parked his car in the exact same spot in the garage, leaving extra room to compensate for my inconsistent placement. I still asked him mundane questions, like whether he preferred spaghetti or penne when making our weekly grocery list.
But eventually, we couldn’t ignore that our marriage was a deflating balloon, leftover from a party thrown long ago. It hovered right below the crest of the ceiling of our home for many of the five years we were married. Air seeped out of it so slowly that we didn’t notice its descent until it lay at our feet, wrinkled and barely recognizable.
There was no explosive pop. But it had ended all the same. All that was left to do was to throw the crumpled, useless remains away.
The first weeks after I left were filled, unexpectedly, with noise.
It came all at once, replacing hushed nothingness with a harsh fugue of tones. I put my hands over my ears and tried to block out the overlapping sounds: the loud scream of the moving truck. The heater in my new apartment that shrieked when it came to life. My thoughts, which chattered loudly as I lay on my back on my new mattress, one that had come crammed into a tiny box and noisily expanded the moment I cut the plastic.
But most of all, I heard the terrible, jarring noise of something breaking. Divorce had made me clumsy. It showed me, again and again, just how fragile everything was.
The pictures I hung on the wall fell suddenly in the middle of the night, jolting me out of my shallow sleep. I carefully vacuumed up the last, splintery bits of glass with bleary eyes, refusing to leave such a mess until the morning. My favorite mug jumped from my hands and cracked heavily against the hardwood floor. I didn’t feel much of anything as I picked up the two pieces and walked them outside to the trash can.
I broke my own skin repeatedly—knives slipped against my wet hands and sliced the tender pads of my fingertips. I held wads of paper towels against my streaming wound and thought about how terrible it would be to bleed out alone. I gritted my teeth and let out a guttural scream of exasperation. It bounced off of the low ceilings of my new place and ricocheted around. I almost didn’t recognize the sound of my own voice.
I felt angry after my marriage ended because nothing made sense. I couldn’t find the right words: divorce felt too clinical and cold. Split made me think of pleasant things, like ice cream sundaes and dads asking their families if they were ready to go.
Breaking up felt the closest. In a way, I had smashed my relationship against the wall and watched the pieces fall silently to the ground. I stared at the fragments and wondered what they all meant. When no answers came, I put it out of my mind.
I swept the broken bits up. And threw them away.
For Christmas this year, Hilly brought me many gifts from St. Croix. A rum cake, a bar of handmade soap, a thin silver bracelet with a knot as a clasp. His final gift came in a tiny drawstring bag made of black velvet. I slid it open and found a piece of pottery, surrounded by sterling silver, on a simple black cord.
He explained to me that this was chaney, the name given to the fragments of pottery that are scattered all around the small island. I admired the cream, teal and cornflower blue hues of the thumb-sized pendant and vowed to learn more about this strangely-named piece of the island.
But the holidays ended, and I tucked the chaney in with the rest of my jewelry and promptly forgot about it. Months passed before I rediscovered the chunk of porcelain and finally sat down to do some digging of the online variety. I wanted to know the chaney’s story.
Chaney is a portmanteau of “china” and “money” that was used by island children who collected the beautiful fragments of china plates and used them in their games as a form of play money. Chaney is found both on the land of St. Croix and in the ocean surrounding it. If you spend some time combing the beaches or places where landfills once existed, you will run across some chaney sooner or later. In fact, many tourists specifically go looking for chaney each time they visit the island.
The broken bits aren’t too hard to find, especially after a hard rain, which moves the dirt and sand just enough to reveal the glittering pieces. Local artisans collect the most attractive ones and turn them into jewelry, like the pendant Hilly gave me. Like the Crucian hook bracelets both he and I wear, chaney is another “island-specific” tradition.
St. Croix was colonized by Europeans for centuries, starting in the mid-1600s with the English. From there, the island was like a playing card in a game of spoons, passed from the English to the French to the Dutch and back around again. Eventually, the Dutch took control of St. Croix in 1733 and remained in power for 184 years until it was sold to the United States in 1917.
As colonizers tend to do, the Europeans who inhabited St. Croix brought their traditions and ways of living to the island. Ships that survived the treacherous journey from Europe to the small, scrubby island were filled with “caseloads of ceramic plates, teacups, saucers, urns, platters and chamber pots.”1
Eventually, most people on the island, natives and colonizers alike, used some form of china in their day to day life. Chaney is even found around the living quarters of enslaved people—sugarcane, the island’s main export, was produced on plantations that relied on enslaved people until their emancipation in 1848—and research has found that these items were often owned by enslaved folks, who likely saw owning china as a form of status or a way to have proximity to the wealth of the plantation owners.
The question of why the island is covered in the broken remnants of chinaware is a point of debate. Some point to the Dutch tradition of smashing chipped plates and teacups against the doorframe of your neighbor’s house during New Year celebrations—it’s supposed to bring good luck to the people who live inside the home and likely became embedded into the culture of the island over the years.
Others attribute the large amount of chaney to Fireburn, a labor revolt organized by three women that resulted in much of the town of Frederiksted going up in flames. It’s reported that during the chaos, many native islanders broke the fragile china in a symbolic act of destruction. Breaking the imported ceramics was an act of resistance and a rejection of the low wages and poor working conditions found on the sugarcane plantations even after slavery had ended.
There’s no way to know for certain why the island is covered in chaney. St. Croix’s written records are fairly spotty, thanks to some poor record keeping and the lack of preservation measures taken by the Dutch colonizers. Despite not knowing its exact origin, it’s a part of the island’s history—a holdover from the past, like driving on the left hand side of the road and the distinctly Dutch names of the towns.
In both of these narratives, the breaking of the plate holds significance. In one, it’s a gesture of goodwill and a wish for luck. In the other, it’s a small act of defiance in the midst of chaos, a way to take ownership back from those who have denied it for so long.
In this sense, chaney is a symbol of bravery. Of being willing to shatter something on your own terms without worrying what it will become next.
I don’t think that the people of St. Croix who raised the plates and teacups and platters over their heads and heaved them down on the hard earth or smashed them against a sturdy door frame knew that, one day, these fragments would become something else.
It’s more likely that they thought that this was where the story ended. After all, choosing to break something is the last frame on the reel, the final note in the song. The only thing left to do press the broken pieces down into the dirt with the heel of your shoe and to grind them down until they disappear.
What remains is simply trash to be thrown away.
I feel like I’ve been in the middle of one, long, drawn-out breakup for the past two years. It started with my divorce, but truthfully, ending my marriage felt like the easiest part of this slow shattering of self.
Bit by bit, I have chipped away at who I thought I was and have found that she is surprisingly fragile. Like the delicate plates that crumbled against unyielding door frames, I am ready to give up and to splinter into infinite, tiny pieces that could never be put back together in the same way.
And why would I want that sameness? Isn’t this my time to become someone new?
Even so, I feel tempted to recreate a similar template of myself as I slowly break up with the city I’ve called home for eight years. I hesitate to smash the plate against the wall, the ground, the door because I want to tenderly wrap it up in tissue paper, pack it away in a box and bring it with me to the island.
But pieces continue to fall. A new teacher will be in my classroom next year and will likely rearrange all of my books and desks into new shapes that I could never recognize. My yoga classes will soon be taken over by people who are not me, who will not walk the studio the way I do. I worry that no one will remember me as the shining, complete piece of pottery I once was. A vessel that carried so many things within it: secrets, lessons, ideas.
I wonder if I should scatter the fragments of me across the city like breadcrumbs, a trail that could lead me back home should I find myself in need of it.
I imagine what St. Croix looked like back in the 19th century as men and women smashed pottery joyfully, defiantly, radically, irreverently…without thinking about what would happen to the pieces after they fell. I see the star-studded sky. I smell the smoke. I hear the impossible noise of fragile vessels breaking, pinning me in place. Forcing me to hear every decibel.
I wonder if I can be brave enough to break. To believe that the shards of who I once was will eventually become something new.
Yesterday, I took my chaney necklace out and slipped it around my neck. Its beveled edges felt cool against my skin. In moments when I leaned over to pick something up, the pendant floated away from my chest. I was surprised at its weight once it fell back against my body. It was comforting in a way, an erratic heartbeat that reminded me that I am still whole.
I wondered about the journey this little piece of pottery had taken to get to where it is now. From a European kiln to the hull of a ship. To the soft hands of an importer. From the rugged ones of a sugarcane worker. To a wooden table. To the side of a door. Back to the earth again, through sun and rain and the angry, noisy winds of a hurricane. From the calloused hands of an artist, who saw beauty and bravery in what was broken. Who believed in it enough to turn it into a symbol of a journey that never really ends.
To me, a woman who is ready to believe too. To believe in a beautiful breaking of self that is less of an end and more of a beginning.
I’m breaking up. And I’m learning to find the joy in the dissolution.
✨Cards for Humanity: The Ace of Swords✨
Whether you’re into tarot or not, here’s a few things to consider about this weird thing called life.
When I first started reading tarot, I was told that the Aces in the deck were gifts from the universe…and whether we chose to accept them or not, they were coming for us in one way or another. In my mind, the Aces sort of turned into the fruitcake of the deck: a gift that you weren’t really sure if you wanted but one that somehow kept ending back up in your possession.
Eventually, I came to adore seeing an Ace when reading for myself or others because it was a chance to start over. To break the patterns you’d been keeping and to forge new ones.
If the Ace of Swords was a gift, it would be one that would give you a giant papercut upon opening it. To me, this card sort of hurts in the sense that it forces you to feel pain in order to see what needs to be cut, broken and reimagined. The sharp edges of the sword pierce a crown in the traditional Smith Rider Waite depiction of the scene, signifying the complete annihilation of what you thought you knew. The crown chakra, the energetic center of enlightenment, is pierced to make room for a fresh, new vision. As the suit that is linked with the element of air, the Ace of Swords comes on suddenly and can blow through just as quickly. But don’t be mistaken: it leaves quite an impact.
It’s an exciting card, but the Ace can be scary because it forces you to explode your perspective on life and yourself into pieces, not to merely shift it around a bit. In the aftermath of the explosion, you’re left to sort out what feels essential enough to carry with you into this new way of seeing life. A common interpretation of the card is to call it a “breakthrough,” or a moment where you’re finally able to pierce the veil and see the truth hiding on the other side.
The prefix is important: we can’t get there unless we break something. Often, it must be ourselves.
When the Ace of Swords shows up in a reading, it’s time to welcome in the sharp, cold breeze that ushers in clarity with it. It’s time to slice through the past and believe that something new can come out of the pieces that remain. It’s a rebel fighting against the conventional, a visionary swinging a sword and smashing a former self into smithereens. The small, yellow symbols that rain down around the sword take the shape of yod, the 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet and a link to the divine.
Once we reach our state of essence, the fragments of our self can reconfigure into something new. We just have to trust ourselves enough to allow the deconstruction to happen.
✨Prompts | The Ace of Swords✨
Meditate. Journal. Pull some cards.
☀️ Where is my thinking being forced in a new direction?
☀️ What fragments of a former self will be carried into this chapter and become something new?
☀️ How can I partner with decisiveness as I open up to a new cycle of thinking?
☀️ How can I shift my perspective into one of trust and abundance as I start over?
✨Weekly Mantra✨
Write it down. Say it out loud. Share it with a friend.
I trust that the pieces of what was broken will become something beautiful.
Most of my research about chaney came from the article “Colonial Trash to to Treasure: The Chaney of St. Croix” by Jessica Priebe. It’s a really thorough look into the history of St. Croix and its entanglement with its colonizers.
You are becoming something new, something filled with love, hope and passion for your future.
Good luck with the move, may your blessings be large 🌻💕
I love the mantra too - that’s going to be copied out 😁