Two for Tuesday: Summer's End

I found this rusty twosome by the side of the road recently. Waiting for garbage pick up, they looked like an elderly couple who'd been through a hell of a lot of summers together. Age shows up differently on each person and the same holds true with these two classic chairs - one is worn in the seat and arms, the other took a beating everywhere.

But there's beauty in decay; there's a tactile elegance in the curbside debris. This portrait reminds me of wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic that embraces imperfection, impermanence, the transient nature of all things.

Seasons are great teachers that everything comes and then it goes. In North Carolina, the acorns are dropping and the tomato plants look as tuckered out as these chairs.

In 2008 I spent a lot of time thinking about Wabi-sabi (a long story). Here's a quote from the Buddhist architect Kisko Kuro Kawa that I found in a journal from that era. We used to consider things that could live forever to be beautiful. But this way of thinking has been exposed as a lie. True beauty lies in things that die, things that change.