ROBYN GRIGGS LAWRENCE is the editor-in-chief of Natural Home, a bimonthly magazine that helps readers craft healthy, serene homes and lifestyles. She lives in Boulder, Colorado. She explains:
Several years ago, I was on assignment at a sweetly rustic stone house in Maine, built completely by hand and appointed with cozy flea market furniture and other dumpster finds. The stove was vintage 1930s, with narrow rivulets of rust in the chipped no-longer-white enamel. The wooden dining chairs didn’t match, and the overstuffed chair near the woodstove carried the slightly soiled chic of a bygone era. While discussing the house with the homeowner, I asked about a rusty grate hanging on the wall.
“Oh, that,” she said. “That is so wabi-sabi.”
“Wobby what?” I asked.
She went on to explain that wabi-sabi was the Japanese art of appreciating the imperfect, the primitive, the incomplete. She sent me home with a slim volume, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (Stone Bridge Press, 1994), the only book that’s attempted to describe this philosophy to Westerners. Before I even read it, though, I knew that wabi-sabi was the concept I’d been living all my life. The beauty of discovering it was to now point to something concrete when answering to my mother, my husband, or assorted others about my wild garden, my raw-wood salvaged French doors, the yellowing enamel table I insist on using as a desk.
There’s much more depth to it than that, of course, as I’ve discovered over the years. Wabi-sabi encompasses so many lifestyle elements that are crucial in a society where no one has time to think and everyone wants it yesterday. Slow down. Take the time to find beauty in what seems ordinary. Allow yourself time for solitude, for exploring your own personal truth. Live for the moment, secure in knowing that life is cyclical. Accept your body’s aging, and appreciate the aging of your soul. See your own wisdom. Make things yourself instead of buying those spit out by a machine, and smile if your work is flawed. Wash your dishes by hand. Stop following rules that don’t feel right to you.
Last spring I published an article on wabi-sabi in Natural Home; it was reprinted in The Utne Reader. In twenty years of professional writing, I’ve never seen such overwhelming response to an article. It hit a nerve—a major one. Readers wrote and told me that they’ve been wabi-sabi all their lives and, like me, had been waiting for the words to describe themselves. I often give workshops on ancient design traditions, and the people who flocked to talk to me afterwards wanted only to discuss wabi-sabi. It seems the time has come for this ancient concept, born in the misty islands of Japan, to have its day in the hot lights of the West.
|
