Wabi-sabi: Time is a Gift
What is Wabi-Sabi?
The Japanese view of life embraced a simple aesthetic that grew stronger as inessentials were eliminated and trimmed away.
-architect Tadao Ando
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.
Wabi-sabi is flea markets, not supermarkets. It celebrates cracks and crevices and all the other marks that time, weather, and loving use leave behind. It reminds us that we are all but transient beings on this planet; that our bodies as well as the material world around us are in the process of returning to the dust from which we came. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace liver spots, silver hair, rust and frayed edges .. and the march of time they represent.
Wabi-sabi is simplicity - possessions which are pared down, and pared down again, until only those that are necessary for their utility or beauty (and ideally both) are left.
Wabi-sabi is subtle: underplayed and modest, the kind of quiet, undeclared beauty that waits patiently to be discovered. It's a fragmentary glimpse: the branch representing the entire tree, the moon 90 percent obscured behind a ribbon of cloud. It's a richly mellow, confident beauty that's striking but glaring, subtle, not obvious.
For the Japanese, it's the difference between ‘kirei’, meaning merely "pretty", and ‘omoshiroi’, the interestingness that kicks something into the realm of beautiful.
Wabi-sabi is authenticity. Daisetz T. Suzuki, one of Japan's foremost authorities on Zen Buddhism and one of the first scholars to interpret Japanese culture for Westerners, described wabi-sabi as "an active aesthetical appreciation of poverty." He was referring to poverty not as we in the West interpret (and often fear) it but in the more romantic sense of removing the huge weight of material concerns from our lives. "Wabi is to be satisfied with a little hut, a room of two or three tatami mats, like the log cabin of Thoreau," he wrote, "and with a dish of vegetables picked in the neighboring fields, and perhaps to be listening to the pattering of a gentle spring rainfall."
Wabi-sabi is respectful, and cleanliness implies respect. Most tempting to use wabi-sabi as an excuse to shrug off an unmade bed or an unswept floor. "Oh, that. Well, that's just wabi-sabi." How tempting to let the split running down the sofa cushion seam continue on its merry way, calling it wabi-sabi. To spend Saturday afternoon at the movies and let the dust settle into the rugs: wabi sabi. To buy five extra minutes of sleep every morning by not making the bed: a wabi-sabi statement. And when have we crossed over from 'simple, serene and rustic' to 'Uber-distressed'?
A solid line separates tattered, shabby and dirty from something worthy of veneration. Wabi-sabi is never messy or slovenly. Worn things take on their magic only in settings where it's clear they don't harbour bugs or grime. One senses that they've survived to bear the marks of time precisely because they've been so well cared for throughout the years.
In Japan, the ability to make do with less is revered, but there is a marked difference between a Thoreau-like ‘wabibito’ (wabi person), who is free in his heart, and a ‘makoto no hinjin’, a more Dickensian character whose poor circumstances make him desperate and pitiful.
‘Wabi’ stems from the root ‘wa’, which refers to harmony, peace, tranquillity, and balance. Generally speaking, wabi had the original meaning of sad, desolate, and lonely, but poetically it has come to mean simple, unmaterialistic, humble by choice, and in tune with nature. Someone who is perfectly him/herself and never craves to be anything else would be described as wabi.
‘Sabi’ by itself means "the bloom of time." It connotes natural progression. Tarnish, rust. The extinguished gloss of that which once sparkled. It's illustrates the understanding that beauty is fleeting. The word's meaning has changed over time, from its ancient definition, "to be desolate," to the more neutral "to grow old." By the thirteenth century, sabi's meaning had evolved into taking pleasure in things that were old and faded.
Sabi things carry the burden of their years with dignity and grace: the chilly mottled surface of an oxidized silver bowl, the yielding gray of weathered wood, the elegant withering of a bereft autumn bough.
There's a poetry in things that carry this kind of patina.
True sabi cannot be acquired.True wabi-sabi is a gift of time.
(Summarised from the article by Tadao Ando, Japanese architect. For the wonderful and full version, please see here)
