November 07, 2009
UTNE READER

Wabi-Sabi: The Art Of Imperfection

Wabi-sabi is the Japanese tradition of celebrating the beauty in what’s flawed or worn. It offers an inspiring new way to look at your home, and your whole life.

September/October 2001
By Robyn Griggs Lawrence, Natural Home (www.naturalhomemagazine.com/) 
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WABI-SABI SECTION
Wabi-whuh?
-Jon Spayde

Wabi-Sabi: The Art of Imperfection (print only)
-Robyn Griggs Lawrence

Living wabi-sabi (print only)
-Marcia Tyson Kolb

Exquisite decay (print only)
-Leonard Koren

Too much of a good thing?
-Karen Olson
Discuss Wabi-Sabi at the Globe forum in Café Utne's: cafe.utne.com

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According to Japanese legend, a young man named Sen no Rikyu sought to learn the elaborate set of customs known as the Way of Tea. He went to tea-master Takeeno Joo, who tested the younger man by asking him to tend the garden. Rikyu cleaned up debris and raked the ground until it was perfect, then scrutinized the immaculate garden. Before presenting his work to the master, he shook a cherry tree, causing a few flowers to spill randomly onto the ground.To this day, the Japanese revere Rikyu as one who understood to his very core a deep cultural thread known as wabi-sabi. Emerging in the 15th century as a reaction to the prevailing aesthetic of lavishness, ornamentation, and rich materials, wabi-sabi is the art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in earthiness, of revering authenticity above all. In Japan, the concept is now so deeply ingrained that it’s difficult to explain to Westerners; no direct translation exists.Broadly, wabi-sabi is everything that today’s sleek, mass-produced, technology-saturated culture isn’t. It’s flea markets, not shopping malls; aged wood, not swank floor coverings; one single morning glory, not a dozen red roses. Wabi-sabi understands the tender, raw beauty of a gray December landscape and the aching elegance of an abandoned building or shed. It celebrates cracks and crevices and rot and all the other marks that time and weather and use leave behind. To discover wabi-sabi is to see the singular beauty in something that may first look decrepit and ugly.Wabi-sabi reminds us that we are all transient beings on this planet—that our bodies, as well as the material world around us, are in the process of returning to dust. Nature’s cycles of growth, decay, and erosion are embodied in frayed edges, rust, liver spots. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace both the glory and the melancholy found in these marks of passing time.
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