Author: We can Paint the Sunrise

Dear Me,

Dear Me,

Wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death. It’s simple, slow, and uncluttered-and it reveres authenticity above all. It celebrates cracks and crevices and all the other marks that time, weather, and loving use leave behind. It reminds us that we are all but transient beings on this planet-that our bodies as well as the material world around us are in the process of returning to the dust from which we came. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace liver spots, rust, and frayed edges, and the march of time they represent.

Wabi-sabi is underplayed and modest, the kind of quiet, undeclared beauty that waits patiently to be discovered… It’s a richly mellow beauty that’s striking but not obvious, that you can imagine having around you for a long, long time..For the Japanese, it’s the difference between kirei-merely “pretty”-and omoshiroi, the interestingness that kicks something into the realm of beautiful (its meanings range from fascinating to fantastic)…

Wabi stems from the root wa, which refers to harmony, peace, tranquillity, and balance… Poetically it has come to mean simple, unmaterialistic, humble by choice, and in tune with nature. Someone who is perfectly herself and never craves to be anything else would be described as wabi.

Sabi by itself means “the bloom of time.” It connotes natural progression- tarnish, hoariness, rust- the extinguished gloss of that which once sparkled… Sabi things carry the burden of their years with dignity and grace…There’s an aching poetry in things that carry this patina… We seek sabi in antiques and even try to manufacture it in distressed furnishings. True sabi cannot be acquired, however. It is a gift of time.

…Wabi-sabi inspires a minimalism that celebrates the human rather than the machine. Possessions are pared down, and pared down again, until only those that are necessary for their utility or beauty (and ideally both) are left…Items that you both admire and love to use… Things that resonate with the spirit of their makers’ hands and hearts… Pieces of your own history….”

–from: “the wabi-sabi house,the Japanese art of imperfect beauty” by Robyn Griggs

Dear Me,

it’s not called failure. It’s called experimenting. As Thomas Edison said ” I have not failed, but found 1000 ways to not make a light bulb.”

Dear Me,

“One day you will realize that happiness is not what your house looks like, but how you love the people within its walls. Happiness is not finding success by a certain time, but finding something you love so much time itself seems to disappear. Happiness is not thinking you have earned the world’s approval, but waking up each day and feeling so at peace within your own skin, quietly anticipating the day ahead, unconcerned with how you are perceived. Happiness is not having the best of everything, but the ability to make the best of anything. Happiness is knowing you are doing what you can with what you were given. Happiness is not something that comes to you when every problem is solved and all things are perfectly in place, but in the shining silver linings that remind us the light of day is always there, if you slow down enough to notice.”

– Brianna Wiest

Dear Me,

Thich Nhat Hanh speaks on the idea of singlessness in his book The Art of Living. Of this he speaks ” Suppose we look up to the sky and notice a beautiful cloud. We think, “Ah, that’s a lovely cloud.” Then we look up a few moments later and the sky is clear and blue, and we think, “Oh, the cloud has disappeared.” One moment things seem to exist and then they’re gone. We look at things this way because we have a tendency to be caught up in signs, appearances, and familiar forms, and this
distracts us from seeing the true nature of reality. When we see something we recognize in the phenomenal world, like a cloud,
we say it is there, it exists. And when we can no longer see it, we say it is not there, it no longer exists. But the underlying truth is that it still exists, even if its appearance has changed. The challenge is to recognize that thing in its new forms. This is the meditation on signlessness… A sign is what characterizes the appearance of something, its form. If we recognize things based on their sign, we may think that this cloud is different from that cloud, the oak tree is not the acorn, the child is not the parent. At the level of relative truth, these distinctions are helpful. But they may distract us from seeing the true nature of life, which transcends these signs. The Buddha said, “Where there is a sign, there is always deception.”With the insight of interbeing we can see there is a profound connection between this cloud and that cloud, between the acorn and the oak, between parent and child.”

Dear Me,

Dear Me,

“If you are going to succeed, you need to destroy your limiting beliefs and create enabling beliefs.”

– Mike Michalowicz, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur

Dear Me,

At a point in winter, often about two thirds the way in, our strength to perservere and maintain optimism are put to test. This is especially so of those long and hard winters; the kind that starts off early and strong, the kind with few days sunshine and unrelenting cold and snow, the kind that shows no signs of lifting early. In these winters, and at that point within them, we rely heavily on that warm flame of hope and optimism that flickers down deep, that unmoveable and unshakeable faith and conviction of a truth that, when it comes to winter, this too shall pass. The knowing that every winter must gives way to spring.

— Dear Me, Original Thought

Dear Me,

Dear Me,