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Wabi-Sabi: As a single idea, wabi-sabi fuses two moods
seamlessly: a sigh of gentle melancholy and a sigh of slightly bittersweet
contentment, awareness of the transience of earthly things and a resigned
pleasure in simple things that bear the marks of that transience.
When I read that definition of wabi-sabi, I realized they were
talking about that pleasant ache I get in my chest every time I encounter
something so beautiful that words fail and the feeling takes over. Some
things in my life that have triggered it (to explain why would take at least
another page each):
Sunset in the south of France near a Roman reservoir with bats swooping out
into the growing darkness.
The first time I saw Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Stumbling across a starlit field full of highland cattle on Iona to lie on
the soft white sand at the beach on the north side of the island.
Music pounding through a valley.
My cat running to greet me at the door.
Standing on the front of a boat with the wind in my hair.
Candlelight.
Songs about heartache.
My godchild smiling when she sees me.
My very first night at my very first Burning Man.
Singing in Latin at a midnight Christmas Eve service in a snowbound
church.
Walking into SFMOMA when I feel like I'm about to go insane.
Evening by Rilke.
Slowly the evening puts on the garments
held for it by a rim of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands divide from you,
one going heavenward, one that falls;
and leave you, to neither quite belonging,
not quite so dark as the house sunk in silence,
not quite so surely pledging the eternal
as that which grows star each night and climbs—
and leave you (inexpressibly to untangle)
your life afraid and huge and ripening,
so that it, now bound in and now embracing,
grows alternately stone in you and star.
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Heidi J. De Vries
