The Face: A Time Code (Kindle Single)

by Ruth Ozeki

What makes a face so special? It’s just an organizational device. A planar surface housing a cluster of holes, a convenient gathering place for the sense organs.

Ozeki is not my father’s face nor my mother’s face, either. Ozeki is my face, the face I chose, a nominal face that keeps them safe from me, and me safe from them.

wabi and sabi evoke the aching appreciation of the beauty of the moment, which arises from our human awareness that everything in life is transient. Wabi-sabi is the aesthetic expression of the Zen teaching of the three marks of existence: suffering, impermanence, and no-self.

This is why we read novels, after all, to see our reflections transformed, to enter another’s subjectivity, to wear another’s face, to live inside another’s skin.

“To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things (of the world).”