The Beauty of Wabi Sabi
I recently had the good fortune to spend an afternoon at the Getty Center in Los Angeles and stumbled upon a book called Wabi Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren.* I was drawn to it by the simplicity of the cover: a single, faded, slightly desiccated leaf. Upon reading, the principles of this ancient Japanese philosophy resonated with me.
Wabi Sabi expresses something of my personal values, as well as those of my aesthetic as theater director. Koren describes wabi sabi as “a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.” The spiritual values stem from the idea that by observing nature we can discover truth. Greatness lies in the inconspicuous details of life. The wabi sabi state of mind accepts the inevitability of life, the decay and irregularity; it finds beauty therein. Clear communication can be powerfully expressed through the intimacy and simplicity of poetry, for example in the 12th century master Fujiwara no Teika.
All around, no flowers in bloom
Nor maple leaves in glare,
A solitary fisherman’s hut alone
On the twilight shore
Of this autumn eve.
-Translation by Toshihiko and Toyo Izutsu.
Wabi sabi celebrates the unpretentious, the earthy, the simple and it finds expression in the leveling and equalizing tradition of the ancient Japanese tea ceremony. Metaphysically everything originates in and devolves to nothingness. As Gloucester says to King Lear in Act IV, scene 6, line 135:
….This great world
Shall so wear out to naught.
*Imperfect Publishing, 2008.
