Wabi Sabi

You won't find wabi-sabi in Botox, glass-and-steel skyscrapers, smartphones, or the drive for relentless self-improvement. It's a beauty hidden right before our eyes, an aesthetic of simplicity that reveals itself only when animated through the daily work of living.

Broadly, wabi-sabi is everything that today’s sleek, mass-produced, technology-saturated culture isn’t. It’s flea markets, not shopping malls; aged wood, not swank floor coverings; one single morning glory, not a dozen red roses. Wabi-sabi understands the tender, raw beauty of a gray December landscape and the aching elegance of an abandoned building or shed. It celebrates cracks, crevices, rot, and all the other marks that time, weather, and use leave behind. To discover wabi-sabi is to see the singular beauty in something that may look decrepit and ugly at first.

Wabi-sabi reminds us that we are all transient beings on this planet—that our bodies, as well as the material world around us, are in the process of returning to dust. Nature’s growth, decay, and erosion cycles are embodied in frayed edges, rust, and liver spots. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace the glory and the melancholy found in these marks of passing time.

Bringing wabi-sabi into your life doesn’t require money, training, or special skills. It takes a quiet mind to appreciate muted beauty, the courage not to fear bareness, and the willingness to accept things as they are—without ornamentation. It depends on the ability to slow down, to shift the balance from doing to being, to appreciating rather than perfecting.

You might ignite your appreciation of wabi-sabi with a single item from the back of a closet: a chipped vase, a faded piece of cloth. Look deeply for the minute details that give it character; explore it with your hands. You don’t have to understand why you’re drawn to it, but you do have to accept it as it is.

Rough textures, minimally processed goods, natural materials, and subtle hues are all wabi-sabi. Consider the musty-oily scene that lingers around an ancient wooden bowl, the mystery behind a tarnished goblet. This patina draws us with a power that the shine of the new doesn’t possess. Our universal longing for wisdom, genuineness, and shared history manifests in these things.

Ikigai

Women, on the island of Okinawa, in Japan, have learned the secret to longevity. Living longer and healthier than any other women on the planet, with many reaching centenarian status, the secrets to their longevity extend beyond a rich diet of plant based foods and an active lifestyle, with many tending to their gardens well into their late 90's.  These  women have no secret potion or super enhanced DNA.

Their longevity comes from something, all of us in North America could be  tapping into for a longer, healthier and happier life. First is the the power of Ikigai. 

Okinawa women strongly follow one's ikigai - one's reason for being or one's purpose in life. While there is no direct English translation, the term embodies the idea of happiness in living. Older 

Okinawans can readily articulate the reason they get up in the 

morning. Their purpose-imbued lives give them clear roles of 

responsibility and feelings of being needed well into their 100s. Okinawa's younger generations pay homage to their elders, recognizing the preciousness of these members of their tribes, fluent in the disappearing dialect languages and age-old traditions. 

Older women are celebrated and feel obligated to pass their wisdom on to the younger females, thus,  filling their life with purpose outside of themselves, and service to their communities. They stand in stark difference to our North American culture, where 

women’s value in midlife and beyond is, politely, undervalued.

Once in North America, midlife women were the next generation to raise the grandchildren, as our sons and daughters foraged for food. Today our grandchildren—if we have any—are more likely to live half a world away than in the next township. Where in other generations, young people revered their elders, sought their advice and wisdom, and listened to their stories with appreciation and interest, our free-range kids make their own decisions and seldom look to their middle-aged mothers for input. 

North American women in midlife and beyond often find themselves dispensable, if not invisible, and collectively silenced. With modern-day "expiry dates" based on our youth and reproductive ability, we enter our later years searching for something to fulfill us, and often for many, our " What now?" whispers. This is where having an Ikigai could extend our years and bring life to those years ahead. 

While our Okinawan women may be following a life of bliss in old age, it was a direction they had been led towards from when they were little girls. For many North American women, our life purpose has never been allowed to grow, or even be nurtured, as we attempt to balance the North American norm and necessity of work in and outside of the home, combined with motherhood, marriage and for most, the hours of commute in between.  

Fueling passion and purpose, finding one's Ikigai often requires deep inquiry and a lengthy period of self-reflection. Unpacking the word Ikigai and its symbols and we see three themes revealed.

Make a list of your values, what you like to do, and what you are good at. The cross-section of these three is your Ikigai. But knowing your Ikigai is one thing; you now need an outlet. Ikigai is purpose in action. Ikigai feels your work makes a difference in people's lives. 

How often in North American life can we say our work makes a difference in people's lives?

As a reporter for most of my life, I can totally relate to Ikigai. 

I got most of my work "rush" from knowing I made a small but measurable difference in someone's life by cutting through the bureaucratic red tape or showing taxpayers a real boondoggle of an idea. Even if we are moving through a dark place and moving with purpose towards a strong or clear goal, we can be seen as experiencing Ikigai.

The 2nd lesson from those old wisdom keepers on the island of Okinawa is community or a tribe of like-minded women.

No matter how small, having a group of people who know your back story and care about you amounts to a special kind of health insurance. This is where belonging to a tribe, something foreign to North American society, plays heavily. I call it best friend-ology. If you have even one best friend you can count on, trust, and understand, hold tight to that friendship as it is your life ring to longevity.

Ikigai, is real and demonstrates how our North American ideals of beauty and youth are shallow and elusive of the big picture: how do I live a longer and happier life? 

Kintsugi

While this ancient Art includes the idea that flaws and cracks add to something’s value, and the living story of an objects life, brings meaning, there is also a larger parallel to draw when you apply these repair practises to both nature and each other.

If we view our planet as a rare sacred antique vessel that needs artful repair, perhaps our imagination could more easily device creative ways to help heal Mother Earth.

For those in our communities who have suffered tragedies and disasters we could soothe their shattered lives with the liquid light of the Kintsugi repair.

The idea of golden light for renewal is as old as life itself. Renewal is present in almost all religious practises and customs  as we instinctively gather in the darkest times to give forth light and renewal. Just think of Christmas and Hanukah, Solstice Celebrations, Festivals of light, and New Years.  

Each of us has some gold or creative spark to give golden light to our world.

Yet because the world’s troubles as now, so profound, with guns killing kindergarten children, and unholy ravages of immoral companies leaving waters undrinkable and great forests permanently scarred, the work seems so daunting we run and hide in fear.

Golden repair will only work its magic, if we believe there is something worth preserving.

Women are artful in the talent of mending and repairing. If we believe our earth and its people, are worth preserving, like a treasured historically ancient bowl of life, then we must each find a small crack and begin the mending.  Our light is needed more urgently as the world grows darker, daily. 

Kintsugi Repair

If we all did a small yet significant Kintsugi repairs, we could collectively achieve much. We would heal ourselves as we repaired the fractures in our families, communities and the vessel we call planet Earth.