Wabi-sabi

 

The Beetle on the Drongo Beak

On Uncertainty, Wabi-sabi（侘寂｜侘寂）, and the Japanese Way of Seeing

A small yellow beetle clings to the beak of a Greater Racket-tailed Drongo.
The drongo’s red eye is sharp, alert, but strangely undecided.
The beetle, perhaps injured, perhaps stubborn, refuses to disappear into the logic of predator and prey.

At first glance the scene feels almost comical — as if the beetle has become the rider and the bird the unwilling mount. But the longer one looks, the more the humour gives way to something quieter and more unsettling. Nothing has resolved. Nothing has concluded. We are caught inside a moment that does not yet know what it will become.

In the Japanese way of seeing, this unfinishedness is not a flaw. It is the very place where meaning lives.

This photograph is held together by Wabi-sabi（侘寂｜侘寂） — the beauty of what is incomplete, unstable, and imperfect. The beetle is not whole. It may be missing a leg. It does not look heroic. The drongo is not triumphant. Its posture carries a trace of hesitation. The scene is not clean or elegant. It is awkward, fragile, unresolved — and therefore deeply alive.

Western eyes often seek outcome.
Will the beetle be eaten?
Is it suffering?
Will the bird finish the act?

But the Japanese sensibility turns away from outcome and toward the interval. What matters is not what happens next, but what exists now. The photograph has chosen the moment before certainty, the space where things are still undecided.

This is where Zanshin（残心｜余心、留心） quietly resides. Zanshin is the state of awareness that remains when action has not yet completed. The drongo has not swallowed. The beetle has not fallen. Both are held in a thin line of tension. The bird’s eye, bright and watchful, reflects this remaining awareness — not yet released into resolution.

The beetle, in that instant, is no longer merely food.
The drongo is no longer merely hunter.
They are bound in a brief, precarious relationship that has no story yet.

This uncertainty carries its own kind of dignity. There is no melodrama here, no violence yet enacted, only a quiet standoff between life and life. The photograph does not rush to interpret it. It allows the ambiguity to breathe.

There is also a quiet trace of Sabi（寂｜寂） — not loneliness, but the solitary weight of existence. The beetle clings alone. The drongo decides alone. Each creature occupies its own fragile position in the world, without guarantee of what comes next.

This is why the image feels strangely human. We recognise ourselves not in the certainty of victory or defeat, but in those moments when we are suspended between them — when we do not yet know how our own stories will turn.

The drongo will eventually act.
The beetle will eventually fall or be taken.
But the photograph has chosen to stay with what is truer than outcome: the trembling, unresolved now.

In the Japanese way of seeing, this is not indecision.
It is life in its rawest form — incomplete, imperfect, and quietly luminous.

And that, in the end, is what the beetle offers us:
not a story,
but a moment brave enough to remain open.