Wabi-sabi has arrived in Atlantic Canada - Or was it always there?

It's neither a condiment, nor a takeout dish-but it can be found in a certain 100-year-old house in Glen Margaret, NS. The floors are sloped, and the walls are crooked – and its owner couldn't be happier.

"What I call beauty, some would call ugly," laughs Joanne Chilton. "It's a matter of perception."

It's also a matter of wabi-sabi, the Japanese art of finding natural beauty in imperfection and aging. Wabi-sabi honours the aging process, finding beauty in everything from a worn wooden threshold and a crumbling stone wall, to the laughter lines on a woman's face. It celebrates the human rather than the machine-the simple elegance of handcrafted objects like pottery mugs and woven blankets. Wabi-sabi is the understanding that to everything there is a season, rather than a belief that things should last forever.

Although hailed by some as the new feng shui, there's nothing really new about wabi-sabi, an aesthetic rooted in Zen Buddhism and the 15thcentury Japanese tea ceremony. But it was new to Joanne in 2002. She discovered it through a book-Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosophers.

In this slender tome, author Leonard Koren set out to clarify the ambiguity around the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, a complex sensibility that he describes as the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.   

"In the end," says Leonard. "I realized I had defined a sense of beauty that is the antithesis of the Classical Western notion of beauty as something perfect, monumental, and enduring."

"That little book changed the way I see things," says Joanne. "I used to dread this time of year [late winter]-the lack of colour, the lack of life, and the lack of light."

After reading Leonard's book, she stopped resisting change and began embracing it-taking creative inspiration from the aging process, both in nature and in human endeavor.

A photographer by trade, Joanne's interest in wabi-sabi spilled over into her work. Her photo of a gnarled tree trunk for the Antigonish Review won an award for best cover art (in literary journals) from the Canadian Magazine Publishers in 2003. Next, Joanne channeled her new understanding into a solo exhibition called Wabi-Sabi, The Beauty of Imperfection at the Sherman Hines Museum and Gallery in Liverpool, NS.

"On all levels there is imperfection and impermanence," she says. "Nature dries up and decay happens-it's part of life."

Visiting a home whose owner had been influenced by the wabi-sabi philosophy was the turning point for Robyn Griggs Lawrence.

"I finally had a name for the way I had always approached home design," says the Colorado author and editor of Natural Home magazine. She would eventually write her own book, The Wabi-Sabi House. The journey took her to Japan.

"Wabi-sabi is now so deeply embedded in the Japanese character that it doesn't even have to be called wabi-sabi," says Robyn.

A longtime fan of the rustic and the worn, Robyn has been working on her home for 12 years and it's still not finished. Once, she might have apologized for her house; now she sees it as a wabi-sabi work in progress. Wabi-sabi explains her undisciplined garden, her vintage furnishings and her flea market finds. It's the rationale for the way she has always lived, not just a convenient excuse.  

"It's more of a mindset than a decorating style,"she explains. "There's no list of rules. It's a sense of authenticity and natural order-a simple appreciation of things as they are."

In home décor, this trend translates to natural materials with rough finishes. Wabi-sabi-like floor coverings include seagrass, jute, cork and sisal, with coarse limestone and slate replacing polished marble and granite. Wood floors remain popular, but in another nod to nature, they now show more knots and grain. The wabi-sabi colour palette is natural as well, with earthy autumn shades of black, slate, dark brown and moss green.

According to Robyn, mass production makes it easy to have good taste these days, but she believes that people want to dig deeper and find the soul in the design for their homes. Her book responds by suggesting strategies for incorporating wabi-sabi elements into contemporary spaces. It advocates reducing clutter, and using salvaged materials, antiques and handcrafted household items to create a common focus from diverse pieces. 

"Wabi-sabi is minimalist in spirit," says Robyn. "Yet, it's a kinder, gentler minimalism than we've seen before-a pursuit of space and light that allows both imperfection and personal whimsy.

"There's a sense of comfort and warmth that comes from authenticity. It can't be purchased online."

Wabi-sabi is the freedom to drink from a favourite chipped mug. It gives us permission to have mismatched cutlery and furniture. However, while things don't have to be perfect, they do have to be well cared for and solidly made. 

"It's wabi-sabi, not wobbly slobby," laughs Robyn.

Wabi-sabi allows people to look at things differently-to see the beauty in wear and to accept that others have handled things before them. It's an understanding that imperfection can actually improve an object.

It's also an understanding that's already widely embraced in Atlantic Canada. Perhaps our tastes have been honed by frugal times, but for centuries we've been mending and patching our garments-and when there's nothing left but rags we make a rug.

Wabi-sabi may come from Japan, but it's right at home in the Maritimes.

Of course having a house full of wabi-sabi might be a bit extreme. Most people prefer to have just a few pieces. This way, the contrast with other things makes the wabi-sabi character more noticeable.

It's a contrast that Joanne understands. Her own home is a happy blend of contemporary and rustic-a celebration of the warped and the wrinkled-with wabi-sabi touches like the bunch of dead branches in a worn vase on an old dresser. 

"I tell my husband Alan to be careful when he's trimming in the garden," she jokes.

"He could cut something that's dead."

Come spring, an arrangement of colourful living flowers will replace Joanne's display of dead branches. For a time, a fresh coat of paint will conceal the cracks and crookedness in the walls of her house. The two dried up apples on the bare tree she sees from her sunroom will fall to the ground, and then the tree will bud and blossom and new fruit will grow, and next year at the same time it will all happen again. 

To everything wabi-sabi, there is a season.