Animism in the City
A Wabi-sabi Weekend
Manchester Buddhist centre
Traditionally, wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. Leonard Koren defines it as:
A beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
A beauty of things modest and humble.
A beauty of things unconventional.
For me, wabi-sabi is about finding both beauty and dharmic truths in our ordinary everyday lives.
Often we escape to the countryside to be on retreat, but this weekend retreat we’ll be searching for wabi-sabi in the city.
Using the Manchester Buddhist Centre as our base, we’ll venture out together into the city with audio guided meditations and reflections. If possible, please bring a smartphone with access to the internet and headphones (I’ll create a printed analogue version of the reflections for anyone that doesn’t have a smartphone).
Back at the centre, we’ll have a programme of multi-media presentations, meditation and time for discussion.
By the end of the weekend, I hope you’ll feel your relationship to previously overlooked, everyday objects has come alive. That things are a little more magical. And you have, as the Red Ladder tagline says, ‘fallen in love with life again’.
To find out more about wabi-sabi -
Book: Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers - by Leonard Koren
Internet: Wabi-sabi and the aesthetics of solitude - Hermirtary
A multi-media weekend of creative Dharma right in the city centre.
Book through the Manchester Buddhist Centre
“If you want to enter into relationship with the universe, if you want to love it, you have to see it as personal… I would go so far as to say that the universe conceived of as dead cannot be a universe in which one stands any chance of attaining Enlightenment.”