Posted 4-2-19
I am about as far from being a Buddhist or eastern religion practitioner as Mr. T was from being a jet pilot or perhaps as a vegetarian would be from writing a cookbook on barbecuing hamsters. That being said, there are a lot of “nuggets” of common sense to be mined from this tradition, unlike the “a broken clock is right twice a day” level of life skill of your writer. One is the concepts of Wabi-Sabi. Wabi-Sabi is explained thusly: “Both life and art are beautiful not because they are perfect and eternal, but because they are imperfect and fleeting.” (I mostly agree with this concept although my Christian tradition disagrees about the eternality of life.) Afterlife aside, though, this is what I like and buy into as far as Wabi-Sabi: life and art are beautifully imperfect. They are a study in contrasts, not unlike what I tried to get across a couple weeks ago in my piece on Floppy Shoes. Lightning in a thunderstorm. Pretty mushrooms in a dead stump. A smile when a frown makes more sense.
Wholeliving.com explains it: “The Japanese philosophy celebrates beauty in what’s natural, flaws and all. The antique bowls above are prized because of (not in spite of) their drips and cracks.”
Oh, that we could see the beauty in our own lives and in others’ without expecting “perfection” in every (non-morality) detail. We struggle and fight at home over keeping the place spotless so that when nobody visits they will be impressed. We work out every detail of a vacation and let the stress of securing “the perfect experience” ruin our respite. We fail to visit the nursing home because we will uncover that ladies (and gents) like the Sweet 17 are so imperfect that we are uncomfortable.
I get it in that last one. I do. As I have mentioned before, I failed to visit my Grandma Applegate in the nursing home she was in for six years more than a handful of times. It is hard to accept imperfection, even in our loved ones who are beat down by this disease. But do you know what our problem is? Our expectations.
I have good news: We can change our expectations!
How about this for size? Next time we go to the nursing home…next time we sit on the couch with our struggling loved one…next time we look in the mirror, let’s look for beauty among/instead of the murk. If we refocus our vision a tad, we can see that there is beauty all around us even in the sadness.
I think of a few of the Sweet 17 damsels in distress in this vein of thought, but it would apply to all of them. Sweet little Ms. W, her head cocked sideways two clicks by this and other ailments, still smiles nearly all the time. Or maybe one of the many Marys, sweetly inquiring to nurses why she actually belongs in the memory unit (daily, practically hourly), then smiling and saying “Ahhh, yes” when told again about the virus that broke her memory. Or, alas, mom, when she rips off a strand of words mixed with onomatopoeia and non-word sounds, then chuckles and amazingly acknowledges something like “that didn’t come out right”. Rather than trying to fix these folks into perfection in our minds, how about we shoot for enjoying the beauty we see as it is presented.
Japanology.com adds ” But during the 14th century, the two words began to take on more positive meanings, with wabi describing the more positive aspects of living alone in nature: a quiet, rustic simplicity. Sabi, on the other hand, began to find beauty in old age, in a weathered character, focusing instead on the serenity that can come with time, when inevitable wear becomes a patina, and scars become signs of experience.
Aging is beautiful. Scars and spots are beautifully patina-covered trophies of surviving the battle. Yet, we fight aging and imperfection like the plague. We fight it harder than the plague. We lift this, tuck that and grimace at anything that is not airbrushed and Photoshopped in our magazine, and we forget how to love ourselves and others in the process.
I am not asking you to ignore the obvious cracks in perfection all around us– in the memory unit or on the couch or in the mirror– but instead celebrate them for how they are and love them as they are. And more importantly and perhaps even harder, be sincere. In antiquity, a broken or withering vase would be glued and patched together like the one in the Brady Bunch episode so they could still sell it. A great article in Desiringgod.com cites a wiki that explains the mythical meaning of this term “sincere” this way: ” (the)English word sincere comes from two Latin words: sine (without) and cera (wax). In the ancient world, dishonest merchants would use wax to hide defects, such as cracks, in their pottery so that they could sell their merchandise at a higher price. More reputable merchants would hang a sign over their pottery — sine cera (without wax) — to inform customers that their merchandise was genuine.”
Similarly, in my Summer of 1990 trip to Israel, we toured ruins of a palace built by King Herod. In this dessert palace, marble was scarce, so they painted up plaster to look like marble in their communal bath area. Touring, we could see that it wasn’t marble, but we loved the look and the bold attempt at use just the same. We appreciated the effort, we gazed at the styles, we marveled at the creativity….all of something that had quite poor utility. It didn’t work well as fake marble. It rotted, it broke, it didn’t heat and cool like marble did based on the surrounding temps…yet we dug it. Can we dig our loved ones the same way? I/we absolutely can if we can just see the beauty in the Wabi-Sabi of the situation and chuck our expectations of perfect and stop forcing our memories of our loved ones to dictate our expectations.
If I slaughtered the concept of Wabi-Sabi for you or got it wrong, I am truly sorry. I am a mere Ozarker blogger writing on a cruddy topic the best I can. Show me grace and see the beauty among the less beautiful this one time, just for me. 😉 Or, as grandma used to say, “eat the meat and spit out the bones”. Let’s keep fighting and praying (sincerely) for a cure to help our loved ones escape this mess, not for our sake but theirs.
#EndALZ