It’s Not Old or Worn Out; It’s Humble Beauty: Learn the Art of Wabi-sabi:

I was excited to get an email from my friend Robyn telling me that she’d written a book, The Wabi-Sabi House. It’s a book about a fascinating concept, wabi-sabi.

Robyn and I met on a fabulously fun press tour to Waldo County, Maine, several years ago. She is the editor-in-chief of Natural Home Magazine.

During our trip to Maine, we stopped at a gift shop owned by a woman who lived in a hand-made house. Robyn was instantly intrigued with the house and took a later trip back to Maine to write about that "sweetly rustic stone house, built completely by hand and appointed with cozy flea market furniture and other dumpster finds."

"The stove was vintage 1930s, with narrow rivulets of rust in the chipped no-longer-white enamel," Robyn explained. "The wooden dining chairs didn’t match, and the overstuffed chair near the woodstove carried the slightly soiled chic of a bygone era."

While discussing the house with the homeowner, she asked about a rusty grate hanging on the wall. "Oh, that," she said. "That is so wabi-sabi."

The woman went on to explain that wabi-sabi was the Japanese art of appreciating the imperfect, the primitive, the incomplete.

"I knew that wabi-sabi was the concept I’d been living all my life," Robyn noted. "The beauty of discovering it was to now point to something concrete when answering to my mother, my husband, or assorted others about my wild garden, my raw-wood salvaged French doors, the yellowing enamel table I insist on using as a desk.

"There’s much more depth to it than that, of course, as I’ve discovered over the years," she continued. "Wabi-sabi encompasses so many lifestyle elements that are crucial in a society where no one has time to think and everyone wants it yesterday. Slow down. Take the time to find beauty in what seems ordinary. Allow yourself time for solitude, for exploring your own personal truth. Live for the moment, secure in knowing that life is cyclical. Accept your body’s aging, and appreciate the aging of your soul. See your own wisdom. Make things yourself instead of buying those spit out by a machine, and smile if your work is flawed. Wash your dishes by hand. Stop following rules that don’t feel right to you."

For more information about Robyn’s new book, check out www.wabisabihouse.com or email Robyn at wabisabihouse@earthlink.net.