The wabi-sabi of journey

Tonight JB suggested we go to our favorite Japanese restaurant. He has been suggesting Japanese food very often lately—picking up sushi from Whole Foods, making miso soup, looking for seaweed salad… It’s probably no accident that we have used Japanese screens to divide the bedroom from JB’s studio (see the day before yesterday’s post). We have worked all day cleaning and decluttering, a major task for anyone who knows us. But we have left enough wabi-sabi—beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete—to mark the space as definitely ours.

And I have immersed myself in the books lent or suggested by friends about life and living in Japan —T.R. Reid’s Confucius lives next door, David Mura’s Turning Japanese, Bruce Feilor’s Learning to Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan, et al…. I have dusted off my old kanji books (I took one semester of Japanese about 20 years ago). The aesthetic of less is more, simplification, and cleaner lines have flooded me. As has IB’s imminent journey. He leaves in less than a month for Japan for at least a year.

JB just asked me if I want to see a film tonight, Kamu Nante Shiranai (Who’s Camus Anyway?) It’s happening to us both. We can’t get enough. Perhaps it’s due to the sake at dinner tonight, but how thrilling and inspiring is the wabi-sabi of journey, not only for the adventurer.