When I was 17 my father and I hiked to Krao Lake. There was a fairly steep climb up through a bolder scree and then at the top of the scree the ground abruptly leveled out, just before the lake. In the small area between the scree and the lake there was a series of small pools in the creek surrounded by forest and craggy mountain cliffs.
The pools were deep and had large rough granite boulders randomly anchoring the scene as if someone had artfully placed them in perfect places. It was an intensely beautiful place, filled with mountain air and light, and I stood staring at it with wonder and delight. I would venture to say it was a sacred place. But not the sacredness of a cathedral, although the similarities are interesting.
The place moved me deeply, and it moved my father too. We would stand looking around just taking it all in. Those moments contain anchors for all that follows in life. And the more of those experiences you have, the more you want them.
I intensely wanted that place to continue being exactly as it was but knew it would not. I knew about the fragility of alpine and sub-alpine areas. I knew that the winter snows could dramatically change a place like this from one year to the next. But I also knew that such areas can retain the quality for a long time. In fact when I returned a number of years later, the place was different.
That particular arrangement of bushes, trees, rocks, water, reeds, and sky had morphed and changed and more or less lost their power. It was still a pretty place, but not evocative. I had been fortunate to see it and appreciate it in that moment. For sensitive souls, poets, song writers, artists, and romantics, sabi is a deep abiding quality that moves us in a direction we want to move. A person might experience aware when she sits in misery contemplating a fallen soldier, too young to have savored the freedom for which he gave his life.
She might be wracked with the pathos of the scene. Her sister, watching the scene from a different perspective, sees the same elements and thinks the same thoughts but moves the pathos towards an aha moment.
An aha moment that is made possible by acceptance. Wabi-sabi preceded modernism, and starkly contrasts with it. The clean, smooth lines of modern design and architecture are the opposite of the uneven, asymmetrical and always curved lines of wabi-sabi. The technological polish and visual clarity of the modern is nothing like the naturalism and ambiguity of wabi-sabi.
In Japan, as in other cultures, the rise of technological perfection has driven a corresponding appreciation of natural materials and organic processes. It is as though the promises of perfection of technology — and the increasing awareness of its limitations in an imperfect world, with deeply-flawed humans — has given a renewed appreciation to a concept like wabi-sabi. As with many Japanese concepts, wabi-sabi can refer to something as quotidian as the design of a tea set or as fundamental as Enlightenment satori itself.
It can refer to the manufacture of pottery for the home, or open up inner visions that can change a life. In Japan, as in other cultures, both of these concepts, and their products, coexist. But in Japan, both are perhaps more strongly felt, and more elegantly-displayed.
How these two very different concepts coalesce into something new, or even if they continue on as two parallel paths, will be part of the story of Japanese culture well into the 21st century. But no matter the course of modernism, given the Japanese character, it is likely that the concept wabi-sabi will endure. If you note a touch of melancholy there, you have begun to understand wabi-sabi.
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