October 2017 – Steve McCurry Curated

Finding Home

Home should be an oratorio of the memory,
singing to all our after life melodies and
harmonies of old remembered joy.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Home is the nicest word there is.
– Laura Ingalls Wilder

Home is where, when you cross its threshold,
you finally feel at peace.
– Dennis Lehane

A home is one of the most sacred of places.
It is a sanctuary into which men flee from the
world’s perils and alarms.
It is a resting-place to which at close of day the weary
retire to gather new strength for the
battle and toils of tomorrow.
It is the place where love learns its lessons,
where life is schooled into discipline and strength,
where character is molded.
– J.R. Miller

Home is where one starts from.
– T.S. Eliot

Where thou art, that is home.
– Emily Dickenson

Home is any four walls that enclose the right person.
– Helen Rowland

Nor need we power or splendor,
wide hall or lordly dome;
the good, the true, the tender-
these form the wealth of home.
– Sarah J. Hale

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
they have to take you in.
– Robert Frost

It takes a lot of living to make a house a home
It doesn’t make any difference how rich you get to be
How much your chairs and tables cost, how great your luxury
It isn’t home to you though it be the palace of a king,
Until somehow your soul is wrapped round everything.
– Paraphrase of Edgar Guest poem, Home

*McCurry family home, Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, USA*

Art of Imperfection

Wabi Sabi is a way of seeing the world that is at the heart of Japanese culture.
It finds beauty and harmony in what is simple,
imperfect, natural, modest, and mysterious.
– Mark Reibstein, Wabi Sabi

Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the
proper circumstances, context, or point of view. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace.
– Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers

It is only with age that you acquire the gift to evaluate decay, the epiphany of Wordsworth, the wisdom of wabi-sabi: nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing lasts.
– Paul Theroux

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins
quoted in the Daily Good

The beauty of wabi-sabi is rooted in modesty that is elegantly perceived.
The aesthetic pleasures of wabi-sabi depend on
attitude and practice as much, or more,
than on the materiality itself.
– Leonard Koren, op.cit.

The underlying principles of Wabi Sabi are diametrically opposed
to those of their Western counterparts,
whose values are rooted in a worldview that
values permanence, grandeur, symmetry, and perfection.
– Andrew Juniper

For a lovely bowl
Let us arrange these flowers
For there is no rice
– Matsuo Bashō, Japanese Haiku

If you look closely at a tree you’ll notice it’s knots and
dead branches, just like our bodies.
What we learn is that beauty and
imperfection go together wonderfully.
– Matthew Fox