Wabi sabi: Impermanent, imperfect, incomplete

In "Perfectly Imperfect," from the September Shambhala Sun, Roger Housden contends that we could all use a little more wabi sabi in our lives. This traditional Japanese aesthetic, he explains, "sees beauty in the modest and humble, the irregular and earthy."

In this excerpt from his classic book Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Leonard Koren — founder of the 1970′s avant-garde arts and culture magazine Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing — explains how, for him, wabi sabi "restored a measure of sanity and proportion to the art of living."

Wabi-sabi resolved my artistic dilemma about how to create beautiful things without getting caught up in the dispiriting materialism that usually surrounds such creative acts. Wabi-sabi—deep, multidimensional, elusive—appeared the perfect antidote to the pervasively slick, saccharine, corporate style of beauty that I felt was desensitizing American society. I have since come to believe that wabi-sabi is related to many of the more emphatic anti-aesthetics that invariably spring from the young, modern, creative soul: beat, punk, grunge, or whatever it's called next.

Wabi-sabi is the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of what we think of as traditional Japanese beauty. It occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideas of beauty and perfection in the West. Wabi-sabi can in its fullest expression be a way of life. At the very least, it is a particular type of beauty.

Koren discusses wabi sabi not just in terms of art, but as a state of mind and a moral precept — read the rest here. You can read an excerpt of Housden's take on wabi sabi here, and you'll find the whole thing inside our September 2012 magazine — click here to order a copy and here to subscribe.

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