Wabi sabi: finding beauty and hope in loss
Back in 2021, I wrote a poem called “Audacity,” honoring a mulberry bush that had somehow found a perch on the seawall that separates Roosevelt Island, where I live, from the East River. It even had ripe mulberries on it, drawing to it a riot of birds! This is part of what I wrote then:
“What audacity!
To trust your right to life, your right to flourish
between slabs of dead concrete!
Audacity? Or prayer?
For when the half moon was casting silver magic over East River
and even the rocks on the banks were asleep
I heard you sing out your fervent prayer
for protection, for fruition
for your life itself.
You did not know to whom you prayed
and it didn’t matter,
for you know in your bones what we forget
That all is alive, that all is god
that all have the power to bestow the blessing of life
when we truly release our belief in self-sufficiency, and ask.”
~~~~~~
Early this spring, to my dismay, I saw that the thriving bush was chopped down!
Believe me, I do understand the need for the seawall to remain sturdy. And I am sure the tree roots were compromising the structural integrity of the seawall.
Nevertheless, it made me deeply sad! Like someone dear to me had lost their battle to live.
~~~~~~
Then, just this morning, I looked at the stump that was left of my beloved mulberry bush.
And behold! The dead and dry stump had put out fresh, bright green shoots. New life. With her trademark audacity!
As I stood transfixed, looking at the stump, I felt this tingling up my spine! I realized that this indeed was a perfect example of wabi sabi . Of life asserting itself. Broken, imperfect, impermanent. And yet, forever reaching out toward breath. Here was an example of life, living. The green shoots brought to mind Viriditas, the “greening power of God,” as described by Hildegaard von Bingen, a twelfth century German Benedictine abbess and polymath.
I stood there, awash in what the Japanese would call mono no aware - the pathos of encountering impermanence, which turns into beauty. I felt that this was a blessing from my beloved mulberry bush, for the sermon I am about to offer this weekend. Indeed, beauty only reaches its full potential, its full gravitas, when it has the ballast of loss and grief to anchor it into the rich, dark earth.
As the month of September unfolds, I stand at the threshold of companioning yet another new cohort of seminarians at One Spirit, and offering a series of new workshops and and talks in different places across the country. I humbly ask for continued blessing from wabi sabi, this deity of deep aesthetics. May I remember to stop and encounter the spirit of wabi sabi often, as I navigate my own life and its necessary losses and imperfections. May this practice grant me the patina of broken and repaired pottery, of an aged tea cup, or of a flower arrangement that is not shy to include a dry and broken twig, and with audacity, call it beauty!
