The Wabi-Sabi Way
The elusive beauty in brokenness and imperfection, $700 in free gifts for pre-ordering The Soul of Civility, and a plea mysterious grace
*Note*: A Gift of Thanks RE: The Soul of Civility
Gracious reader,
In two and a half months, my book—The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves—will be released. (See the book trailer above!)
I created over $700 worth of FREE GIFTS for you to enjoy right now, and to thank you for your pre-order of the book.
The pre-order gifts include:
Four Civility Books that Will Change Your Life course (a $350 value)
How to Talk to Anyone about Anything toolkit (a $47 value)
Cultivating Curiosity: A Beginner’s Guide to the Life Well Lived ebook (a $12 value)
Regular calls with Alexandra Hudson and some of the most interesting and curious people of our day (a $250 value) — the first one will be with Daniel Darling, author of The Dignity Revolution (2018), and most recently, Agents of Grace (2023) on the need for Christian unity.
A free year of Civic Renaissance (a $70 value)
I worked many hours to create these resources for you to enjoy between now and October 10, 2023, when The Soul of Civility will released. I hope you have as much fun consuming them as I did creating them!
I can’t wait to share them, and my book, with you!
Thank you for your partnership in re-humanzing our politics, and in reclaiming respect and friendship across difference.
Christmas Crisis
Seven months ago, my family and I came home from Christmas holiday to our home having being destroyed in a flood. The old pipes in my historic home were no match for the deep midwestern freeze of this past Advent season.
For three, maybe four days, the water ran.
It poured through every floor of the home, destroying everything in its path.
When we came home after a long day of travel, it was surreal to see ceilings and walls caved in, furniture, art, clothes saturated and ravaged.
It was like a scene from Jumanji, raining at Biblical levels in our dining room, with several inches of water pooling on the floor of our 109 year old oak floors.
Virtually everything was violently taken from us in the flood. We were given a blank slate.
It’s been traumatic.
But since then, we’ve had the chance to re-build, to re-imagine the life we yearn to fashion for ourselves now.
It’s a wonderful opportunity. We get to examine from scratch an important set of questions: What is the home we want to create for our family? How do we embody our ideals of curiosity, hospitality, community and conversation in our design and architecture?
It’s also an overwhelming proposition.
There’s a lot of pressure these days to make all aspects of your life “Instagrammable”—or visually pleasing and perfect.
But I’m increasingly intrigued and trying to embrace a different aesthetic standard—one that embraces the beauty in imperfection.
I’m talking about wabi-sabi—or the Japanese aesthetic ideal of finding beauty in brokenness.
The Wabi-Sabi Way
In the West, we have certain standards of beauty that have their roots in the classical Greco-Roman tradition: balance, symmetry, proportion, harmony.
Even unconsciously, we’re often quick to dismiss anything that doesn’t adhere to the timeless, and in some ways universal, principles of beauty.
As I’ve learned recently, life, nature, and human beings are not always polished, pristine and symmetrical.
We're raw, ragged, broken, imperfect.
Can there be beauty—and value—in that?
I’m falling more in love with a concept from the East—originally from the Chinese Buddhist tradition and now prominent in Japanese aesthetics—called wabi-sabi.
Wabi-sabi is about the beauty in imperfection, in flaws.
The idea derives from two words: wabi, meaning subdued, austere, understated or overlooked beauty, and sabi, meaning rustic, almost desolate, patina.
There is still beauty in something that is incomplete, impermanent.
Embracing this has given me freedom to embrace the beauty in the patina, the imperfection of my old home. I’ve chosen to lean in to the “elegant decay” in many ways, instead of trying to force my vision of beauty onto an old home that has been around for a century longer than me, and will probably be around long after I’ve faded from this earth.
The Japanese also give us the concept of kintsugi, where broken things are repaired with gold (or silver) so that the previously broken item is more beautiful than ever.
These ideas combined are powerful.
First, the notion that there is beauty in imperfection itself.
And second, that there is opportunity in our brokenness and imperfection to become stronger, better, and even more beautiful than ever.
Our wounds, our brokenness, our imperfections aren’t something to cover up. They can be badges of honor. They’ve made us who we are. They can make us better—if we let them teach us and help us grow.
Remembering these ideas can free us from contemporary ideas that anything less than perfect symmetry, smoothness, put-togetherness is worthless. This isn’t true.
We live in an era of strange perfectionism, where we dismiss outright someone who has erred instead of embracing that imperfection is what makes us human.
"To err is human, to forgive divine,” as 17th century English poet Alexander Pope wrote in his An Essay on Criticism.
Our mistakes can even make us beautiful—and leaving room for grace in our hearts for others’ imperfections, instead of being quick to write them off or condemn them, ennobles both us and others.
Mysterious Grace
I am acting as the general contractor—quite literally—on our home restoration from our Christmas crisis.
I am living through one of the most challenging seasons of my life right now.
I’m tested in my patience and emotional energy and reserves of grace more than ever before in my life.
It’s not quite ideal timing to be running on empty like this just as my book—a project I’ve worked on for ten years, and to some extent my entire life—comes out.
Publication date is just over two months away—and there’s still so much to do.
Also in Japanese aesthetics, there is a concept of yūgen, which means “mysterious grace,” or grace found and given even amid the darkness and obscurity.
It’s difficult to show grace to people when we only see them from the outside. We don’t know their inner state. We only partially perceive the truth about them.
Yūgen suggests that there is more than meets the eye—and that what we see is not all there is. When I’ve been supremely vexed and frustrated, and people have responded with kindness and grace to me, I’ve been most humbled, and taught.
This challenging time leads me to two requests.
Can you help me with my book launch?
It’s unbelievably humbling to be brought to the limits of my capabilities as I am in this season.
Necessity breeds innovation—and causes us to depend on others.
You’re my community, my friends, and I need your help.
Here are some things you can do.
Join my launch team! Write to me at ah@alexandraohudson.com with the subject LAUNCH TEAM if interested. (Launch team members get a FREE hard copy upon publication!);
Ask your local book store to carry the book;
Think about what people in media or organizations that you know who might be interested in partnering on a conversation about civility and respect across difference;
Buy a book! (If you haven’t already). Or if you have, buy one as a gift! (And claim your $700 in free gifts!).
Can you be gracious to the short-tempered and graceless others whom you encounter this week?
Over the last several months, as I’ve been brought to my knees through this trial of loss and restoration, I have been the short-tempered, graceless other. Especially recently, life has felt fraught. I’ve felt the strain of the pressure to get back into our home in two months while preparing for the book launch, I’ve often had days where the tests and trials of life bring out the worst in me.
The low-grade aggravations build, and the tensions grow.
And then something small triggers me, causing a big, inordinate reaction.
I regret when this happens. It means I’ve let the power of the emotion in the moment take precedent over my ideals. It’s an error, a mistake, revelatory of my brokenness. But to the point of today’s reflection, can there be beauty in those moments of brokenness? Maybe it to be found in the restoration and reconciliation after the bond has been strained.
I strive to maintain my habits of resilience to prevent against the short temperedness to which I am prone, and to cultivate the grace that is so essential to living well and with others.
But it still happens.
And it’s given me another perspective—one with more compassion for others, more willing to dispense freely with “mysterious grace”—when I encounter short-tempered others.
If someone were to respond to my harshness with harshness—or to send me a snippy email following up when I haven't responded to them, as I am sometimes tempted to do when following up with others—it would be like kicking me while I’m already down. It wouldn’t be productive.
I’m already just barely surviving.
We have no idea what others are going through from the outside. Often, sharpness in one’s tone is a sign that some deeper pain is at play and manifesting—and our sharp retort, instead of easing that pain, will often only make it worse.
Life is hard enough as it is.
How can we make it just a little bit easier for one another?
Embrace and show mysterious grace this week.
You won’t regret it—and you’ll make the world a brighter place.
Beautiful