Imperfect

This is the cup from which I take tea everyday day. You can see clearly that’s handmade: the shape of the cup is irregular, the surface has little cracks (raku fired) and the painting is rustic. With our western values we should say it’s not a piece of beauty, with a lack of symmetric, not perfectly shaped and a bit decayed.

But more and more I feel all around me the appreciation for pottery and other handcrafts. The qualities for making things beautiful are not based on our principle, but on an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence, imperfection and incompleteness of all things.

This is the quintessence of wabi-sabi (Japanese aesthetics), an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world.