Month: May 2025

A Japanese tea bowl, irregular in shape and glazed in earthy tones, may at first glance seem crude compared to the precision of fine porcelain. Yet its roughness is deliberate – an aesthetic choice that honors the handmade, the asymmetrical, and the imperfect. It invites us to appreciate the beauty of the unrefined, the incomplete, and the transient.

Western art has often pursued an ideal of flawless execution, but this can leave us feeling inadequate in the face of our own imperfections. By contrast, the Wabi-Sabi tradition reminds us that there is profound beauty in the marks of wear, the uneven edge, the faded color – signs that an object has lived, been used, and borne witness to time.

Alain de Botton and John Armstrong,  Art as Therapy

The wish to know oneself is often a wish for certainty, for a fixed identity.

But the self is more like a conversation than a monument -shifting, contradictory, and alive in ways we can’t always grasp.

Adam Phillips, Monogamy

When you stop taking experience personally,

the whole drama of ‘I, me, mine’ unravels.

What remains is just life, happening.

Andrew Olendzki, The Buddha’s Medicine