Art of Imperfection

Wabi Sabi is a way of seeing the world that is at the heart of Japanese culture.

It finds beauty and harmony in what is simple,

imperfect, natural, modest, and mysterious.

– Mark Reibstein, Wabi Sabi

Agra, India

Iraq

Tibet

Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the

proper circumstances, context, or point of view. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace.

– Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

Cambodia

Cambodia

It is only with age that you acquire the gift to evaluate decay, the epiphany of Wordsworth, the wisdom of wabi-sabi: nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing lasts.

– Paul Theroux

Havana, Cuba

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

– Gerard Manley Hopkins

quoted in the Daily Good

Ethiopia

Ethiopia

The beauty of wabi-sabi is rooted in modesty that is elegantly perceived.

The aesthetic pleasures of wabi-sabi depend on

attitude and practice as much, or more,

than on the materiality itself.

– Leonard Koren, op.cit.

Kathmandu, Nepal

The underlying principles of Wabi Sabi are diametrically opposed

to those of their Western counterparts,

whose values are rooted in a worldview that

values permanence, grandeur, symmetry, and perfection.

– Andrew Juniper

Laos

Preah Khan, Angkor, Cambodia

For a lovely bowl

Let us arrange these flowers

For there is no rice

– Matsuo Bashō,  Japanese Haiku

Russia

Mandalay, Myanmar/Burma

If you look closely at a tree you’ll notice it’s knots and

dead branches, just like our bodies.

What we learn is that beauty and

imperfection go together wonderfully.

– Matthew Fox

Havana, Cuba

Srinagar, Kashmir

Mandalay, Burma/Myanmar

India

Japan

Elberton, Georgia, Deep South, USA

Havana, Cuba

A diamond with a flaw is worth more

then a pebble without imperfections.

– Chinese proverb

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