Wabi-sabi appeal lies in what cannot be bought or mass produced. Leonard Koren speaks of 'may they help you find beauty in the imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. ".
In wisdom, age is really just an older version of youth. A wabi-sabi interpretation would suggest value the wrinkles, using them to sound the depths, to enter the soul of the subject. A Clint Eastwood approach to heritage : just enough face lifts to stay out of the swamp but not so many you actually lose the wrinkles. Those wrinkles are earned. They signify. Why throw them away ?
Today wabi-sabi is known in the West as a popular trend in style and interior design, yet it originally drew on Chinese Confucianism and Japanese Taoism as a defiant response to elite materialism !
The Japanese elites of the 15th and 16th centuries loved ornate tea ceremonies. Prestige delicate pottery was used until Murata Shuko , a Zen monk, purposely opposed materialism of the fashionable tea ceremony by using local, understated, and worn or cracked utensils in his ceremonies. Eventually, wabi-sabi tea houses became fashionable !
I wonder that we cannot transform the wabi-sabi wisdom to our bodies ? The suffering is often in the resistance, judgement and self-criticism. Yet, self acceptance can reduce the billion dollar beauty industry ( and waste ) and instead offer peace and happiness within ourselves, just as we are.
Wrinkles are earned. They signify. Why throw them away ?
Extracts from Lions Roar, Sandra Hannebohm
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