A Zen monk will go into the mountains to devote himself to Buddhist training. While engaged in his practice, deep in the mountains and far from any village, he might receive a visitor. “I sincerely regret bringing you all the way here, to the middle of nowhere,” he might apologize to the visitor. This apology—in Japanese, wabi—is the first component of the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi. The second part—the sabi—refers to a similar sentiment: “Thank you for coming all the way to such a lonely and remote place.” Sabi is also a homonym that connotes patina or rust—the beauty that comes with
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