Lately, I had a chance to profile Peter Wilson, a Campbell River man recognized internationally as a grower of fine bonsai. The cultivation of those curiously-dwarfed trees is an ancient Japanese art, and the ideas behind it shine a light on everyday life.
The aesthetics of bonsai are connected to Zen Buddhism, a school of thought pointing towards a truth that’s said to be transcendent, that goes beyond words or concepts. Through meditation, practitioners cultivate acceptance for change and for the imperfection embodied by suffering. That acceptance is said to be part of the path to satori, or sudden enlightenment.
In bonsai, those ideas of transience and imperfection are related to the shapes taken by trees with the passage of time. They’re often asymmetrical. Many incorporate deadwood branches. Contemplating the gnarled trunks and limbs of trees that are perhaps centuries old is a way to contemplate time and change, and the flawed beauty of existence.
That flawed beauty is called wabi-sabi, a concept that’s hard to define but central to Japanese aesthetics. It’s related to the Japanese idea that beauty can be found in ordinary concrete objects and everyday events, a tendency that philosophy professor Yuriko Saito of the Rhode Island School of Design calls “aesthetic egalitarianism.”
In an essay in the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, she writes about the concept of wabi-sabi this way: “Its appeal to the general populace, both wealthy and poor, stems from its aestheticization of the conditions of life in general – the impermanence and imperfection of existence.”
Or, to quote Bob, the endearingly bumbling Italian tourist in the 1986 Jim Jarmusch film Down by Law: “It’s a sad and beautiful world.”
Maybe this appeals to me personally because my attention is somewhat consumed by the human condition. As a reporter and news junky, the suffering of ordinary people in day-to-day life is often top of mind.
So it gave me pause the other day to read about the changes that have shaped the Earth’s physical shape, its lithosphere, the solid exterior of our planet, over the course of thousands of years, as glaciers gave way to oceans and river valleys. The Carleton University geologist Allan Donaldson offered a thought experiment: If the entire existence of the Earth were compressed into just one year, our lives would have begun one second ago. The oldest written records would be one minute old. The last ice age would have taken place two minutes ago. The first humans would have appeared three hours ago, the oldest rock 10 months ago. According to Donaldson, if the planet were formed one year ago, the universe would be three years old.
To me, there’s something beautiful about our imperfect lives flickering momentarily in these vast sweeps of time. And in the same way, there’s a beauty in the stories of ordinary people living their lives, working and building their communities – stories chronicled in these pages. Reporters strive to capture some of the beauty of these moments, memories that people can clip from the physical newspaper and put on their fridges. As much as possible, we try to integrate the different angles of a story, include the relevant voices, check all the facts, avoid typos. But perhaps it’s inevitable that the stories are incomplete flawed. To perfectly represent any single aspect of reality would perhaps take as long as a million articles written on deadline.
But the daily effort to realistically describe the communities in which we live gradually creates a body of knowledge that’s substantial, if fragmentary: a first draft of history, new branches on an old tree.