Wabi-sabi: The Beauty Of Imperfection
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
–Leonard Cohen
Tucked away in the deepest heart of Japan, somewhere beyond city life, probably beyond country life, resting in a humble shack on a simple shelf in a nearly bare room, you can find a really powerful idea about beauty. This idea, this way of life, this way of being, goes against everything the contemporary American culture sells. It goes against perpetually new cars, updated wardrobes and model homes. It is so radical, it goes toe-to-toe with any notion that the way things are ~ even when they are falling apart ~ are not the way things ought to be.
The idea is scoffed at by those who inhumanely offer something more, and bigger and better. Yet if we can find our way past the standard-issue scoffing, hunt down this old idea, and recognize it as the pearl of great price, we can heal these painful beauty obsessions of ours. Really, we can.
What is this simple idea that has the power to take on an entire capitalistic culture, or at least the capitalistic culture within us? Wabi Sabi, the art and practice of honoring the imperfect.
Yes, there actually is a whole field of study and devotion to this very topic we are starving for. Wabi Sabi celebrates the cracked pot, the aged desk, the beaten up fishing rod, and the rusting bed frame that has become an outdoor border for a flower “bed” in the yard. It is Wabi, the “humble,” alongside Sabi, “the beauty of the natural progression of time.” (It is also much more and far deeper than that, but this is a start.) It leaves behind the