Wabi Sabi

In the mailbox this Moon-day morning . . .

Yesterday was the 149th anniversary of Robert Frost's birth. He was born in 1874 San Francisco; it was also Tennessee Williams birth date, in 1911 Columbus, Mississippi; and F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel, This Side of Paradise, was published yesterday in 1920.

Wabi sabi is a Japanese term that, unlike the contemporary ideal of smooth, streamlined, futuristic creations, value the organic, imperfect, faded nature of earthy things – handmade one at a time, not mass produced, and all the more appealing when worn through loving use. Wabi sabi relies on intuitive, right-here right-now observation, without any glance toward the future or even the idea of progress. A pastoral aesthetic, wabi sabi not only accepts nature as unruly and uncontrollable, it welcomes nature’s rule, beyond the scope of any technology we can create, however sleek and obedient. So, wabi sabi embraces the idea of corrosion, decay to the point of disintegration, and ambiguity, in warm fluid shapes and quietly resonating earth tones. Crack-lines on your coffee cup. Poetry, too, can be wabi sabi, if it arouses an acceptance of reality at its most exquisitely mundane, in which things and people break down, but are no less beautiful for that. . .We can’t enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention. . .[R]relish life’s sensory festival. Everything that happens to us – from choosing the day’s shoes to warfare – shines at the depot where nature and human nature meet. . .and the day begins. – Diane Ackerman

Strangers

is a word derived from the othering

we were taught. Children do not know

othering.

Everyone is a friend not yet met.

The asshats we meet are not

strangers, but friends

practicing ignorance.

3.27.23 jb