Wasabi--Now That's Hot!

Theme Song: Turning Japanese

Joke of the Day

What did one Japanese bee say to the other Japanese bee?

Wasabi?

Get it? What's up, Bee?

Japanese Culture Day

Today is Japanese Culture Day. Well, okay, not really. I made it up. Or, it's my own personal Japanese Culture Day.

So, let's celebrate!

Three Things I Love About Japanese Culture

What follows are three amazing concepts (or rituals) brought to us by Japan. They are only heartbreaking because of their incredible beauty. Yes, beauty breaks your heart, but it's the kind of heartbreak that lets the light shine through.

On second thought, all heartbreak lets the light shine through, but beautiful heartbreak pierces you with gratitude right away instead of taking you on a grind to get there. . . .

Zen

Yes, I know. Zen comes from India. And it had to go through China to get to Japan. The trip was long, but it was worth it. Why? Because of these poems if for no other reason:

A Meal of Fresh Octopus
Lots of arms, just like Kannon the Goddess;
Sacrificed for me, garnished with citron, I revere it so!
The taste of the sea, just divine!
Sorry, Buddha, this is another precept I just cannot keep. -- Ikkyu

Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die -- Basho

Wild roses,
Plucked from fields
Full of croaking frogs:
Float them in your wine
And enjoy every minute! -- Ryokan

Wabi-Sabi

Wabi-sabi is the artistic embodiment of heartbreak. It is an aesthetic based on the three marks of existence from Buddhism, namely:

• Impermanence
• Suffering and
• Emptiness

People, I know these are scary ideas, at least on the surface. You may not feel like facing them today. I don't blame you. Take your time and when you are ready sit down with a cup of high quality, organic Japanese green tea and let these ideas erase you.

Drink your tea from a cup handed down to you by your grandmother. You know, the one with the faded pink roses and a chip on the rim. Now you are experiencing wabi-sabi.

Kintsukoroi

Kintsukoroi is a Japanese art form in which broken ceramics are mended with gold or silver lacquer with the understanding that they are more beautiful for having been broken.

Take a moment to ponder that concept, so foreign to Western materialism, while I take a moment to cry, my heart broken open with the beauty of it.

Here's more, taken from Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics (which I highly suggest you take a look at, especially the drop dead gorgeous images at the end of the report):

. . .mended ceramics convey simultaneously a sense of rupture and of continuity. That one moment in which the incident occurred is forever captured in the lines and fields of lacquer mending. It becomes an eternally present moment yet a moment that oddly enough segues into another where perishability is circumvented by repair. Simultaneously we have the expression of frailty and of resilience, life before the incident and life after. Yet the object is not the same. In its rebirth it assumes a new identity that incorporates yet transcends the previous identity. Like the cycle of reincarnation, one life draws to a close and another begins.

Alright, people. I hope I haven't overwhelmed you with all of this intense and moving beauty. Or maybe, in some small way, I contributed somewhere, somehow, to a heartbreaking open.

Love to you on this cold and windy San Francisco day.

Your Turn

Please share your own examples of heartbreaking beauty. You know we're ready!