On Wabi-Sabi Wednesdays, I feature excerpts from my upcoming book, Simply Imperfect: Revisiting the Wabi-Sabi House , which will be released next month. 

Daisetz T. Suzuki, one of Japan’s foremost English-speaking authorities on Zen Buddhism and an early interpreter of Japanese culture for Westerners, described wabi-sabi as an active aesthetical appreciation of poverty. He refers to poverty not as we Westerners interpret—and fear—it, but establishes the difference between a Thoreau-like wabibito (“wabi person”) and a Dickensian makoto no hinjin,whose poverty makes him desperate and pitiful. 

Wabi-sabi is a celebration of the freedom that comes from shedding the huge weight of attachments and material concerns. “Wabi is to be satisfied with a little hut, a room of two or three tatami mats, like the log cabin of Thoreau,” Suzuki wrote, “and with a dish of vegetables picked in the neighboring fields, and perhaps to be listening to the pattering of a gentle spring rainfall.”

  

Wabi is to be satisfied with a little hut, a dish of vegetables picked in the neighboring fields and the pattering of a gentle spring rainfall.  Photo by Povy Kendal Atchison