Wabi + Sabi = Perfect Imperfection

As time goes by, I find myself coming to appreciate the beauty of imperfection- a concept the Japanese call "wabi sabi."  The aesthetic of wabi sabi encompasses so much more than this; I can't explain it in words, but I think that maybe I'm learning to see it.

Words exist because of meaning.  Once you've got the meaning, you can forget the words. ~Chuang Tse

 Wabi sabi acknowledges three things: "nothing is perfect, nothing lasts, and nothing is finished."  ~Richard R. Powell 

 Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace. ― Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers 

wabi ... simple and quiet, austere refinement

  Nothing to do with grandeur or symmetry.  ~ Wabi Sabi:The Japanese Art of Impermanence by Andrew Juniper

 The moon’s setting, a crow caws, the sky is filled with frost
Maples by the river, fishermen’s lights, the traveler faces a sad sleep
Outside the City of Suchow, from the Cold Mountain Temple
The sound of the midnight bell reaches the traveler’s boat               ~Cheung Chi

 Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death. It's simple, slow, and uncluttered-and it reveres authenticity above all.  ~Noble Harbor.com

wabi is ...tranquil simplicity;
austere elegance;
unpolished, imperfect, or irregular beauty...

...rusticity;

 things in their simplest, most austere, and natural state;
a serene, transcendental state of mind...             

 

sabi is... the beauty that treasures the passage of time, and with it the lonely sense of impermanence it evokes;
the patina that age bestows...
which is true to the natural cycle of birth and death...   

 ~from Wabi Sabi: The Art of Everyday Life by Diane Durston

"Wabi sabi" was a phrase conceptualized by the Japanese poet Basho, who was also known for writing haiku.

if I took it in hand,
it would melt in my hot tears—
heavy autumn frost

Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.    ~Lao Tse

Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.   ~ Hans Margolius




On a completely different topic, I was excited and honored to be asked by artist/blogger Nanci Hersh to do a guest post as part of her "The Artist as Collector" series. Please check it out and see which piece from my own collection I chose to feature.  Nanci's blog, On and Off the Walls, is well worth reading any time, as she is an accomplished writer and artist with lots of inspiring ideas.Thanks, Nanci!

Just Because...

they're beautiful...

It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.
-  Henry Beston, 1935, Herbs and the Earth                                          (Glacier national Park)

"Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. " - Hermann Hesse                            (Lewis County, Kentucky) 

   

The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see ...  No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, as vital to our lives as water and good bread. -  Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire                                                                                  (Camp Joy, Ohio)

So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to thee.
 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
      (Springrove Cemetary and Arboretum, Cincinnati, Ohio)       

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.  --- Henry Miller                   (Shabo Mekaw, Kinneykonick, Kentucky)

“It is a constant idea of mine that behind the cotton wool (of daily reality) is hidden a pattern, that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this: that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.”  -Virginia Woolf                                  (Lewis County, Kentucky)

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.  --Wendell Berry               (Shabo Mekaw, Kinniconick, KY)

"So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts....Practice resurrection.”-- Wendell Berry                                                                             (Shabo Mekaw)

 “When it’s over, I want to say: All my life I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms." --Mary Oliver                        (Taylor Mill, Kentucky)

   “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”-- Wendell Berry
 (Glacier National Park)

                                      (James River, Richmond, Virginia)


 “Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?"


 Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross
Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?”
-- Mary Oliver

The Patina of Age

As I was walking through my flower gardens yesterday, I was disappointed to find that many of the summer flowers were winding down.  My first thought was that it wasn't very pretty; heat, lack of rain, and time had taken their toll.  Perennials that had produced lavish displays of color all summer were finished blooming, leaving brittle dry stems and faded flowers that were going to seed.  But as I slowed down and really looked, I began to see that a transformation had taken place.  They were still beautiful; I just had to look at them differently to see it.

The colors are muted, with more variation in tone than before...

grays and browns are mixed with soft mauves and peaches...

 ...with petals dried and curled until they look like crazy dancers in a windstorm.

They embody the Japanese aesthetic quality called wabi-sabi. Put in simplest terms:

 

Wabi is the beauty that comes from the right kind of imperfection,

and Sabi is the beauty that comes from age.

And aging means changing...

 

...it's a different kind of beauty...

 

 but beautiful, still.  I can see that now.

Kinneyconnick

This place is sacred to me; a place of peace and beauty. Profound connection with the Earth is an experience for which there are no words, because it is beyond thought- it's in our very blood and bones. Walt Whitman tries to express this truth in his poem "Song of the Rolling Earth", excerpted here.



A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,
Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground
and sea,
They are in the air, they are in you.



Air, soil, water, fire-those are words,
I myself am a word with them-my qualities interpenetrate with
theirs-my name is nothing to them,
Though it were told in the three thousand languages, what would
air, soil, water, fire, know of my name?



Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid and
liquid,
You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,
For none more than you are the present and the past,
For none more than you is immortality.



I swear I begin to see little or nothing in audible words,
All merges toward the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the
earth,
Toward him who sings the songs of the body and of the truths of the
earth,
Toward him who makes the dictionaries of words that print cannot
touch.