this wabi sabi life‌
alexis yael
Dedicated to my love, Mike, always: You are the one I want to grow old with. And to our beautiful Remy, who means everything.
this wabi sabi life‌ was written and designed and photographed by:
Alexis Yael of alexis-yael.com and alexisyael.etsy.com and is shared under creative commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike You may distribute it with attribution. You may change it as you will, as long as it is shared in kind, for non-commercial purposes. You may not use this work commercially. Contact me: alexisyael@gmail.com On facebook On twitter
Self-acceptance. It's everywhere and nowhere, all at once, isn't it? For every fifteen books and articles you read about accepting yourself, there's fifteen thousand images of Photoshopped inhuman-looking "beautiful" people. For every story of self-love, there are more about how wrong our basic human impulses are.
How is my very human body supposed to compete? How does my very human self compare?
It doesn't.
But it does get easier to stop comparing.
For all my swagger, I was an insecure teenager. My self-acceptance mask was almost always firmly in place, because I needed to seem accepting, but underneath, I was shaking. “Fake it til you make it,� they say. And I love-hate that saying, because sometimes it is used to project more "I am so perfect" bullshit out to the world and I really hate hypocrisy. But it is also true: the more I projected self-acceptance, the more I actually came to love and accept the very core of my being. I just kept coming back to it over and over again (and not, hopefully, in a hypocritical kind of way, though I am aware of my very human tendencies towards hypocrisy). Reminding myself over and over:
I am beautiful.
Wabi-sabi is loosely translated from the Japanese as “the beauty of imperfection.�
Wabi-sabi is one of my core values, in large part as a rejection of the slogan Lexus (a company that happens to bear one of my nicknames) had in the 90s, "The pursuit of perfection." Wabi-sabi is ideologically opposed to perfection, to cookie-cutter, to only wanting new, to only valuing youth. I value my aging. I value that I am still alive and growing every moment.
Wabi-sabi is about living in the moment. This moment. Where I am right here. Right now.
I inhaled the newness of my newborn, when he was new, when I was in those moments. They were glorious and they were hard and they were oftentimes both. But I do not seek to preserve those days forever. I am not upset he is growing, because that is the function of living. I am happy to have a growing child, who will one day (please G-d) leave me. This is my deepest wish, that my child will go off and make a life of his own, whole and loved, loving and kind. And happy and sad and very, very human.
I don't know how to explain this to most Americans. I flounder in conversations where people make that face when they admit how old they are, or wish out loud that their child would stay a baby forever. Part of me wants to shake them. "Don't you know that that is a death wish????" But I know the death wish is strong in our culture, disguised as the love of everything new, new, new. It is the denial of life, which is death.
It only seems life preserving. And to me, living wabi-sabi means accepting that which isn't easy to me. So, I bite my tongue to keep from judging (most of the time; I am human) and I say what is true for me:
I am happy to be aging.
I look forward to forty and then fifty, and sixty and seventy and eighty and I hope, oh I hope ninety and one hundred. (Wouldn't that be a trip!).
Every year that I am here is a gift.
I've come closer to death in thirty six years more times than I care to count. Every moment I am here is a gift. Every moment I am able to breathe is a gift I do not (as an asthmatic) take for granted. Some moments suck. Some times, I get so angry and depressed that I can hardly move and I don't feel alive, I feel stuck. But that is part of being me. Of my experience. And I can either accept that and move on (because 99% of the time I don't feel that way) or I can spend my life wishing I was different.
And I'm choosing acceptance. Over and over again. Every day, every moment. It's not always easy, and I slip sometimes, but then I come back to this moment and I choose again.
This is the essence of meditation, of practice.
My core values do not have to be your core values. We are all unique and beautiful. You do not need my acceptance. You only need your own, just as I do not need your acceptance. It is nice to be together and accept one another, but it is not necessary, if we accept ourselves. This is what I wish for myself, what I am working toward. Self-acceptance. Wabi-sabi living. This is the moment. This is my life. This is me. Whole and beautiful. Practicing. A very human be-ing.
may all beings know happiness may all beings know freedom may all beings know their own beauty alexis-yael.com 7.6.2011