Wabi Sabi

Once a month, I go up into the mountains for several days to work at my second job with the High Country UU Fellowship.  Sometimes, between all the meetings and social events, I get a chance to take a brief hike on one of the many trails in the area, which I love.  I remember one time when the trail I chose led me through an area with many dead trees, which felt sad, but there was one tree in particular that caught my attention.  It was a tree that had been damaged in its youth–nearly snapped in two, it appeared, but then it had recovered and grown upward again from its twisted base.  Now the tree was dead, and most of its bark was missing.  I stared at the strange curves of the bare, silvery wood, and I admired its beauty.

There is a term for what I saw in that tree: Wabi Sabi.  Wabi Sabi is a Japanese phrase that describes an aesthetic of transience, asymmetry, and simplicity.  “Wabi” literally means poverty, but it has come to represent a spiritual path of harmony with nature and contentment with simple things.  “Sabi” literally means solitude, suggesting melancholy and unfulfilled longing, but it is also a form of humble and nuanced beauty found in specific, ordinary objects.  Together, Wabi Sabi represents an aesthetic that finds beauty in forms that are irregular, natural, transient, modest, rustic and old--even cracked or decayed.  It is influenced by Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and to some degree Confucian and Shinto perspectives.  You can hear it in classic Japanese poetry and see it in certain forms of Japanese art.

It is difficult to translate the phrase “Wabi Sabi” into English, but my favorite interpretation is this one: “the beauty of the imperfect, the impermanent, and the incomplete.”  The beauty of the imperfect, the impermanent, and the incomplete.  I like that definition because it describes our own lives so well.  Aren’t we all imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete?  Yet we are beautiful nonetheless, each and every one of us.  Our very existence is miraculous and beautiful, in spite of all our imperfections.

This idea, Wabi Sabi, flies in the face of our typical Western assumptions about beauty.  We tend to believe that ultimate beauty is about lasting, finished perfection.  We are encouraged to strive for everlasting youth, perfect bodies with flawless skin, spotless homes and offices, undefeated seasons, ideal vacations, and perfect Christmas celebrations.  Just look at the magazine covers at the grocery store.  But life rarely cooperates with our desires for perfection, leaving us feeling disappointed and inadequate too much of the time.  Life has more struggle and loss than that, and at times it can be downright ugly.  But instead of facing and accepting the brokenness, tragedies and imperfections of life, incorporating them and transforming them into a Wabi Sabi kind of beauty, we are tempted to split off and deny the parts of life we don’t like, pursuing instead a fantasy of perfection and immortality.

Sometimes, when the problems of life seem overwhelming, we project these images of perfection and immortality beyond our earthly lives and into a heavenly realm after we die.  This desire is not new.  The ancient Egyptians sought to ensure an ideal afterlife for their leaders by placing their preserved bodies in the most spectacular of tombs.  Yet, as impressive as the pyramids may be, even they will not last forever.

Just as I am tempted to fight or deny my own imperfections, I know I am tempted to fight or deny my own impermanence and mortality as well.  I understand the appeal of a glorious afterlife, especially when I consider how much suffering there is for so many people in this life.  I share a desire for justice, relief and reconciliation in a future existence, repairing the wrongs of this life.  I love the thought of learning the truth about the mysteries of life and meeting the divine face to face.  Perhaps the most appealing idea of all regarding an afterlife is the image of being reunited with loved ones who have died.  I am open to whatever may be the truth, and I am intrigued by some of the mysterious experiences many people report around death, although I realize our interpretations of our experiences are not always reliable, even when the core experience is genuine. 

The idea of an afterlife may appeal to me, but when I reflect on my images of an afterlife more deeply, they begin to break down. It is easy to imagine a joyful reunion with loved ones when I die, but then I find myself wondering, like the fish floating in plastic bags at the end of the movie, Finding Nemo, “Now what?”  Suppose we are reunited with loved ones when we die. Would we continue to interact with each other, changing and growing in the process, or would we remain the same?   If we change and grow, and do so forever, wouldn’t we eventually change in every way possible, and what would become of our relationships and identities?  If we don’t change and grow, then what’s the point?

Even the moment of reunion raises some questions.  Would we meet our loved ones as they were when they died, or when they were at their prime (whatever that might be), as they have become since they died, as we remember them best, or some kind of conglomeration of all of the above?  Would children grow up?  Would we recognize them? Would my grandmother with Alzheimer’s get her memory back?  Would we still have bodies of some kind, and physical experiences, and would we keep the thoughts and memories and desires, the connections to particular times and places here on Earth, the flaws, limitations and abilities that make us who we are, or would these things all become irrelevant?  Who then would we be?

Heaven is often depicted as some kind of ideal state, a land of milk and honey and streets paved with gold, where there is no more suffering or imperfection.  But even that can lose its appeal upon reflection.  I am reminded of a Twilight Zone episode where a gambler dies and goes to a heavenly realm where all his desires are fulfilled.  Beautiful women drape themselves over him, and his luck is so great that he wins every time he places a bet.  But after a while, the women begin to annoy him, and he becomes bored by games that come out the same way every time.  He tells his guide that he is getting so tired of heaven that he almost wishes he could go to the other place.  The guide then replies in an ominous voice, “This IS the other place.”

Perhaps the point of the story is that the gambler’s desires were the wrong ones, that he should have desired to sing praises to God instead.  But as much as I enjoy singing, the thought of doing nothing but singing even the most sublime songs forever and ever and ever is not very appealing.  Other ideas about an afterlife don’t seem much better.  The idea of reincarnation raises its own questions about personal identity, and it makes the reunion with loved ones problematic.  If reincarnation goes on forever, the very thought of it is exhausting, and if it does not, we still have to face ultimate mortality.  In some schools of Buddhist thought, nirvana is the ultimate release from a cycle of birth and death.

We may wish for immortality, but it’s hard for me to imagine anything going on forever and ever that doesn’t seem more like hell than like heaven.  Perhaps there is no sense of time in the afterlife, and one moment is indistinguishable from an eternity.  But if so, what distinguishes one moment in our lives now from an eternity?  If that is all we need, we may have it now.

In the end, any afterlife or continuity of consciousness that might exist after we die would surely be very different from anything we can imagine or anticipate.  The best thing to do now is not to waste our lives worrying about it, but to remain open to whatever the truth may be and to live our lives here on Earth as well as possible, regardless of what may or may not come next.  The impermanence of our lives should not be cause for despair.  Most of what we value in our lives comes as a direct result of our mortality, of the trajectory of time and change that takes us from birth to death.  The fact that we are born and die is what gives our lives a definite shape and identity, creating a sense of importance and unique value for everything we do and decide.

A Wabi Sabi approach to life accepts and embraces our particularity, our imperfections, and the brief, mortal span of our lives.  It also embraces the sense of incompleteness that we so often feel as we live our lives.

During our lives, we strive for many goals and ideals, but we rarely achieve them fully.  Often, our experience of meaning in life comes more from the striving itself than from the achievement.  I remember when my sons George and John had their eye on an ice cream maker that took five thousand tickets to earn at Chuck E. Cheese’s.  For many months they saved up all the tickets they earned rather than cashing them in for prizes.  The day they reached their goal and cashed in all their tickets to get the ice cream maker was very exciting, but the experience of using it was anticlimactic compared to what they had imagined.  With no higher goal to strive for, they lost interest in Chuck E. Cheese’s, and they stopped asking to go there. (Not that I’m complaining, I might add.)

The point of this example is not that we shouldn’t try to achieve our goals.  Goals keep us going and achievements should be celebrated.  But we should never think that we can only be happy or have meaning in our lives when we finally achieve our goals or dreams. Some goals worth striving for can never be achieved–what matters most is whether they point us in the direction of learning and love and justice or not.  Sometimes, we act as if we are waiting for our lives to really begin as soon as we achieve some goal or milestone, but in fact we are as alive as we will ever be right now.  If beauty and meaning are to be found anywhere in our lives, it will be right now and right here, in our imperfection, our impermanence, and our incompleteness.

The beauty of Wabi Sabi is all around us.  It is in the wobbly first steps of a child, in the skill to maneuver a wheelchair, in our personal quirks and mannerisms, and in the wrinkled, worn face of someone we have loved for years.  It can be seen in the ordinary things of everyday life, in a worn-out stuffed animal, or in the delicacy of a flower that soon wilts.  Wabi Sabi is found in the myriad permutations of human life and sexuality, in the memory of a life cut short, in day after day of caring for another person, in struggles to recover from wounds of the past, in the dreams and fears that motivate our lives, and in fumbling attempts to do the right thing.  In spite of the brash commercialism of the holiday season, there are hints of Wabi Sabi in the Christmas story, in the baby laid in a manger and the quiet of Silent Night.  Wabi Sabi is everywhere in nature, from a lichen-covered rock to the twisted, silvery wood of an old tree.  The beauty of the imperfect, the impermanent, and the incomplete.  

Perhaps everything could fit that description, so it is fair to ask, is everything beautiful?  I would say, at one level, yes–the beauty and miracle of existence pervades everything in some way.  The beauty in everything is there for us to see, especially when we look through the eyes of love.  At another level, there is still ugliness in the world.  But the ugliness that matters is not the imperfection of our bodies or the clutter in the hallway.  A deeper ugliness is found in hatred, prejudice or fear, in beliefs that alienate us from one another, and in denial of the realities of life that we do not wish to see. 

The role of religion should be to open our eyes, to reconcile us in love, to help us overcome our fears and to embrace life in all its beauty, misery and hope. I believe we discover beauty as well as meaning in our lives when we commit ourselves to keep our hearts open to truth and love as far as we are able, whether difficult or easy, joyful or sad.  To follow that commitment means we must not deny our potential, including our potential to affect the lives of other people and living beings.  It also means we must not deny that we have limitations, and that we always have room to grow--that we are imperfect and incomplete and can never possess morality or truth with total certainty.

We do not lose our beauty when we make mistakes, when we are injured or disabled, when we discover we are different from what we or someone else expected, or when we fail at something we have tried.  If we simply hate or try to deny these realities, they become ugly, but if we accept them, seeking to learn and grow in compassion and wisdom as a result, they become part of the Wabi Sabi beauty of our lives.  When we integrate our lives in this way, we also become more patient with the imperfections of others and more able to extend our love even to those who may not know how to receive it.  There is plenty to strive for in this life that gives us meaning.  Each act of love, each bit of learning, each creative expression, each step toward justice has value and meaning in and of itself. 

And then, in the end, there comes a time to let go.  However imperfect and incomplete our lives may be when we die, we are still beautiful.  It would be nice to live forever, or, then again, maybe it wouldn’t.  It is painful to lose people we love, but we do keep them alive in a very important way in our own lives and memories.  Among the traditional Bantu in West Africa, a person is not even considered dead until the last person who remembered him or her personally by name has died.  Also, in another sense, our lives and our relationships are already immortal in the moment they occur.  Our lives are forever woven into the fabric of time and space, and no one can ever erase that fact.  Perhaps immortality is just another perspective on time.

A Wabi Sabi approach to our mortality is found in the ancient tradition in Japanese poetry of the death poem, a brief three-line poem composed just before someone dies.  Listen to these two examples, from the poets Basho and Baiko:

On a journey, ill:                  
my dream goes wandering
over withered fields.

Plum petals falling
I look up...the sky,
a clear, crisp moon.

So simple, so strangely profound.  Much of Japanese poetry and art expresses the aesthetic of Wabi Sabi, a quiet, sometimes poignant acceptance of the simple realities of life and death.  This aesthetic may sound strange to Western ears, but it resonates with at least some of our Unitarian Universalist principles, from acceptance of one another to the inherent worth and dignity of every person and an awareness of the natural world to which we are connected and of which we are a part.  As we incorporate Wabi Sabi into our own perspective, we may want to add a sharper edge of justice-seeking social action, but on the whole, Wabi Sabi is very consistent with Unitarian Universalism.  Our first task is just to listen and observe.

We don’t have to be perfect to be beautiful.  We don’t have to complete all our goals for our lives to be worthwhile.  And while I would be delighted to meet God or my loved ones when I die, the meaning of my life does not rest upon that possibility.  Instead, the meaning of my life is rooted in the miracle of existence itself.  I can imagine that there might have been nothing.  I might never have been born, but here I am, at least for now.  Each brief moment of life is a gift, even when it is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. 

May we embrace this imperfect life, observing the world around us with loving eyes, accepting one another and letting our fears and attachments go.  May we keep our hearts open to lifelong growth in love and learning, and may we care for other travelers on the journey of life with justice, compassion and creativity.  May we open our eyes to the world of nature and to the quiet value of simple, ordinary things.  For when we do, we find in the process all the meaning and beauty that one life can bear.

May it be so.