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My Wabi-Sabi Master is My Dog
By: Galina Pembroke
My Wabi-Sabi Master is My Dog
Perfection is a gooey chew toy on a worn out old blankie
By GALINA PEMBROKE
Up until recently, three dominant attitudes have ruled my living space:
my boyfriend's: if it breaks, fix it.
my own: if it breaks, replace it.
and my dog's: if it breaks, keep it and love it all the more
Without realizing it, my dog has been a master practitioner of wabi-sabi, a Japanese aesthetic philosophy that celebrates the simple and the handmade, including the flaws.
Especially the flaws…
More than just the appreciation of unpretentious art and craft, wabi-sabi is a uniquely joyful way of viewing and contemplating the world. As Leonard Koren describes it in Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, wabi-sabi is "the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete." It is no coincidence that the first practitioners of wabi-sabi were Zen Buddhist monks and tea-masters.
My dog Tucker is a 30-pound, wooly sheltie-crossbreed; painted by the creator with a wholly imperfect, abstract pattern of brown, black and white. With his flattened, rock-chewing teeth; he is an unlikely leader. Yet, through his actions, Tucker has shown me the beauty of wabi-sabi .
Presents and Presence
Every year I celebrate Tucker's birthday which I maintain is the day he stepped out of the dog pound and in through my door. For me, this means the renewed challenge of shopping for a new dog toy that promises to delight Tucker and light up his wabi-sabi life. For Tucker, this means the aggravation of me dangling another squeak-toy or Kong product in front of his unimpressed snout. I am such a consumer fool.
Every year it's the same. Polite dog that he is, Tucker examines the shiny new object with feigned interest before dismissing it. He then curls up in his war-torn blanket to gnaw on his ancient, barely identifiable, mangled ball. Once a perfect sphere, it now resembles a cracked egg. With its aged crevices and broken, rounded protuberances, I am unable to understand how he could be near it- let alone mouth it.
Tucker, however, couldn't be happier. Drooling contentedly over his gooey-soft ball, he shows me that perfection cannot be bought, achieved, manipulated, or maintained. It is an inner experience: canine wabi-sabi.
The Perfect Cloud
In India, there is a mantra signifying this feeling of fullness. Translated, it is "That is perfect. This is perfect. From the perfect springs the perfect. If the perfect is taken from the perfect, the perfect remains."
Too bad this understanding is absent from so much of our "new is better" consumer society.
Wabi-sabi is a less wasteful way of living. Even Tucker’s assortment of bought-and-soon- forgotten dog toys can be donated. Satisfaction with things as they are, though used and worn, means we replace less and save more.
Handmade and one-of-a-kind, wabi-sabi pottery is deliberately and gloriously "pre-owned" right out of the box. Wabi-sabi regards these flaws as enhancements. Western culture imitates this in marketing, with new-worn jeans and marked-up furniture. We tag this as recycled and call ourselves retro. Recycling doesn’t exist in the wabi-sabi world. My attempts at converting Tucker’s ball into sheet-plastic via the recycle box, have been met with prompt retrieval by digging paws and slobbering jaw. In wabi-sabi, decay replaces conversion. [Would be interesting to note the similarity(?) to the modern Western countercultural aesthetic of worn and torn blue jeans and recycled vintage clothing and furniture.] As Buddhist poet and musician Leonard Cohen observes in his song "Anthem," "There's a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in." In life, rain and ice may crack and erode the new and the beautiful, but the crumbling marks they leave behind are the signature of water, the ultimate life-giver. Thus, wabi-sabi doesn't simply see the silver lining in every cloud, it sees the cloud itself as a silver lining in a perfect blue sky.
As I struggle to appreciate the beauty of decay, Tucker is my faithful wabi-sabi master.
Tucker and I are running barefoot through the soft sands of my hometown’s ocean beach. The night air feels clean and cool. I stop often, dislodging the golden-grains from between my blue-painted-toes while searching for a stick. I throw Tucker a three-foot long mini-log, and he returns it as a six-inch frayed twig. He will not surrender it. I hoist and parade another mini-log. He ignores me. He is mesmerized by the twig. He has the perfect chew toy. Marred. Scarred. Semi-hard. Its decay proves to be its strength. It is the perfect Tucker stick toy in all its dwindling six-inch glory.
I too have a habit of chewing my environment. Pens and pencils are particularly attractive when I'm struggling with a new challenge. In the past, I would discard my teeth-indented creative tools”. But Tucker has taught me the value of fractured belongings. Now when I look at the mangled implements of my creative struggles, I see their scars as battle wounds, each one a testament to the origin of a thought. I keep and respect them.
Everything is Enough
As Plato suggested true perfection is always an ideal, never a reality. Consider "the perfect egg." There are so many variables beyond the cook's control: the stove-top temperature, the accuracy of the timer, the needy neighbors relentless ringing (I love alliteration) at the door. Even if you do achieve the ideal creamy softness
or just-hard-enough suppleness, the egg still won't taste just right if you're queasy over being dumped, fired, or otherwise jarred by the outside world. Ultimately, the perfect egg is an inside job.
As the Tao Te Ching it states “If you mold a cup you have to make it hollow: it is the emptiness within that makes it useful.” Westernized society tends to see holes as absences, instead of potential. Every day we suffer disappointments, because reality - like some mangled chew toy or overboiled egg - falls short of our ideals.
Yet those rows of hard bitten pencils bear witness to our best efforts. We have given it our best shot. Like Tucker, all we need do now to find wabi-sabi contentment is to stretch out on our war-torn blankets and delight in what we have.
About the Author
Galina Pembroke is an internationally published writer who specializes in health, self-help and spirituality. She is publisher and editor-in-chief of New View magazine online. Launched March 6, 2005, New View is a comprehensive resource that offers information and inspiration for a happier, healthier life. Visit them at http://www.nuvunow.ca
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