Wabi-sabi offers a refuge from the modern world’s obsession with perfection, and accepts imperfections as all the more meaningful – and, each in their own way, beautiful.
Today it encapsulates a more relaxed acceptance of transience, nature and melancholy, favouring the imperfect and incomplete in everything.
This opportunity to actively engage with something considered to be wabi-sabi achieves three things:
- a full awareness of natural forces involved in the creation of the piece;
- an acceptance of the power of nature;
- and an abandonment of dualism – the belief that we are separate from our surroundings.
To see time as a deeper source of beauty, far greater than a two-dimensional flash of gold.
In Taoism, since no further growth or development can take place, perfection is considered equivalent to death. While we strive to create perfect things and then struggle to preserve them, we deny their very purpose and subsequently lose the joys of change and growth.