Finding Balance in Imbalance

 "Wabi Sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.”

                                   Leonard Koren

A Japanese statement on aesthetics,  dating back to the 16th century, Wabi Sabi is symbolic of the rebellion against the expectation of being perfect. It is an outright  celebration of the mundane, the humble, and the flawed. Etymologically and conceptually speaking, the term can be broken down as follows:

Wabi is about the humility that emerges from a state of solitude, which in turn gives the ability to see through the superficial and connect with the truth. Free from embellishments, it seizes life in its rich  raw details and is contemplative of things that are simple, and incorporate rustic beauty.

Sabi, on the other hand expresses quaintness and loneliness which accompanies aging. In the post-medieval Japanese vision of art, such old, disfigured and discarded items donned on a new symbolism,  representing things  touched by the auric grace of time.

Wabi Sabi, therefore, far from being slick and modern, is a quirky flea market piece, a hand-me-down heirloom, or an aged wooden floor, epitomizing simplicity, natural beauty, and a perfectly imperfect feel.

The story of Wabi Sabi finds its humble origin in the tale of Sen no Rikyu and his tea master Takeena Joo. Upon his master’s request,  Rikyu cleans and rakes the garden to perfection, and as a final touch, shakes the cherry tree, allowing the flower petals to fall nonchalantly around the yard! This legend, in its quintessential simplicity, exemplifies the inherent poetry of Wabi Sabi, seeking to find a balance with a carefully designed insouciance. Both ikebana, the art of flower arrangement, and the 17-syllabled haiku are rooted in this tradition.

Now, imagine a cup or a teapot that slipped off your hand and broke. What would you do? You’d most probably pick up the pieces and throw them in the bin. But were you a  Wabi Sabi practitioner, you would carefully glue the pieces of broken pottery back together and return the item  to its usual place. Yet, inadvertently, the zigzagging line of the cracks would  set it apart from the rest, reminding you of the told and untold stories hiding within its scars, and of the temporal beauty, made eternal by its resilience.

Since Wabi Sabi revolves around the belief that objects with  former lives have  greater depth and a wider spectrum of experience, it tends to honor the old and wrought, bent and crooked, over the new and shiny. Wabi Sabi also seeks to break the barrier between the outer and the interior space by placing emphasis on the natural. Bits of driftwood, pebbles, shells, frosted glass, bark strips are used not only to add a touch of earthiness to one's surrounding, but also to fuse the man-made objects with those from Nature, thus creating an intrinsic harmony between the two worlds.

The principle of Wabi Sabi when extended to our personal life could very well be interpreted as an acceptance of ourselves: with our strengths and our flaws, our failures and successes. In fact, it is this amazing conglomerate of opposites, which exist only to complement each other, that gives us our vibrant, creative wholeness. 

What follows is a simple poem to encapsulate my own understanding of Wabi Sabi: 

Broken shadows of tall elms
zigzagging down the footpath
and spilling onto the
narrow asphalt road...
Broken views from
cracked glass window,
ready to crawl in;
Broken remnants of
ancient monuments
filtering the evening sun,
summoning the banshees;
Broken frame, glued together,
holding a b-w photograph
of our parents on their wedding day.
Broken pieces of blue sky,
shimmering in a puddle
after the monsoon shower;
Broken floor uncovering
a steady file of Brahmin ants:
exposing the underworld;
Broken reflections of
snow-peaked mountains
rolling  in the waves.

Broken, unfettered, and erratic,
ready to be something new,
something different and
explosively poetic...
ah! I  yearn to be
a shard of that brokenness
to feel whole again.