Wabi-sabi | Excursions

When my daughter attended preschool, she became friends with a lively classmate from Japan. The friendship was a brief one because her friend’s family moved back to Japan too soon. But what wonderful days our families shared during the time we had together.

The girls were possessed by a happy energy that caused them to leap into each other’s arms over every beautiful little thing that swirled around them. For instance, there was the precious thrill of cute! when my daughter’s pet rabbit gave birth. How carefully the girls snuggled those seven bunnies in their own eager preschool paws, giggling as though the kingdom of childhood and animals had finally come to rule the world.

And what a good time we had whenever my daughter’s friend invited us for lunch at her house. She would greet us at the door and properly instruct us on how to remove our shoes before entering her home. Next, she guided us through customary table manners, none of which restrained the girls from engaging in silly conversations throughout the meal.

When a large group of relatives visited from Japan just before Halloween, my daughter’s friend asked if she could bring them to our house to see our Halloween decorations. It became the first (and only) time I hosted a tourist event in my home. I wasn’t prepared to explain ghouls, tombstones, and spider webs, but polite bows, gentle nods, and cheerful smiles assured me it didn’t matter.

After my daughter’s friend returned to Japan, we received a simple gift at Christmastime. It was a Japanese calendar decorated with enchanting artwork on lovely paper along with some Japanese Christmas treats. I made the treats into ornaments and saved the calendar as a treasured artifact of a special friendship. Photos of my daughter’s friend showed her settled into a new school lined up with her Japanese classmates—all of them dressed in uniform, with matching shoes and socks and hats and backpacks.

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Through my Filipino maternal grandfather, my family tree branches back into a landscape of Chinese ancestors I am only beginning to discover. I have trained in Korean martial arts, learned how to hand quilt with Japanese women, practiced Sumi-e brush painting with a German master, studied Chinese language, history, anthropology, and politics, and, I have immersed myself in learning the theories and practices of Japanese and Chinese garden design.

For me, Asian art and culture inspires devotions to finding and achieving precious.

I am a disciple of wabi-sabi, which is hard to explain, but you know it when you come upon it or create it. Although wabi-sabi considers the sublime beauty of perfect imperfection, there can be no fooling oneself that Asian art and culture often perfectly presents an illusion of simplicity that has only been achieved after arduous ritual, study, and lifelong practice.

Life is so complicated. And nowadays, due to the vast systems of connectedness that bear in on all of us, we are presented with a steady feed of tragic events as they happen in real time throughout the world. We are never left unaffected, and often forget how the simple act of making friends can lead to more and more good in the world, too.

Art can provide respite, too. And a chance to connect.

Right now, and for only a few more days, there is a multimedia, contemporary art installation created by a consortium of artists, engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists based in Japan, on display at the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall, Radcliffe Yard, Cambridge, MA.

The exhibition is called: What a Loving and Beautiful World.

It’s free and open to the public.

—You go into a room. Chinese and Japanese characters come floating down the walls. You reach out and touch them or wave your hand close to them. Dreamy things happen.

I was alone in the room at first. Then some children showed up. We reached out and touched the art, together. We started laughing. Your hand becomes like a magic wand. Birds. Butterflies. Rainbows. Snow. Sun. Moon. Fire. Trees. Mountains. Flowers.

I think we were creating new visual worlds through causes and effects, through the influences of collisions, of fear, of wind, of the laws of attraction, computer science, technology and music—all combined with the radical acts of passing through each other’s lives, in real time, in real space. In Peace. After taking an excursion into a real city on a real train and a real subway.

It’s all really cool.