Kii is as good a place as any to meditate on the past. Folks here cultivate a healthy relationship with decay. The right storm could wipe it all clean overnight. And that’s fine, they seem to say, and sometimes outright say it.

Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son—a thought that appalls me, but one that’s hard to deny, since I surely won’t be doing it when he’s thirty—there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be

WABI SABI is in many ways like the bittersweet taste of the last strawberry in this old Zen tale. It is an expression of the beauty that lies in the brief transition between the coming and going of life, both the joy and melancholy that make up our lot as humans.