Just Outside of Eden
At first, when I focused closely on the fuzzy little globes that decorated the bushes along the woodland path, I was surprised to see that they were, in fact, a cluster of tiny flowers. “How pretty!” I thought. They reminded me of the sequined Christmas bulbs my mother had crafted one year when I was a child.
But I wasn’t the only one who found them attractive. As I looked more closely, I saw that they had drawn a whole battalion of tiny black bugs who were feasting on their nectar.
“Nothing’s perfect!” I laughed, and took their photo anyway.
The bug-laden flowers reminded me of a story I once heard about a certain band of eastern monks who always left one flaw in their otherwise meticulous works of art to reflect the imperfections that dot everything in the natural world.
“How wise of them!” I thought, “And how accepting!” Standing as we do, just outside of Eden, one world removed from the gardens where perfection shows its face, we tend to rail against the flaws we perceive in our reality. Something in us longs for perfection. Our sense of it is so clear. We war against ourselves for not meeting its standards. We punish others whose flaws seem even larger and darker than our own. And so we create a downward spiral of darkness, feeding it with our anguish and blame.
The wise monks, on the other hand, simply look on the imperfections as a natural phenomenon, accepting them as an inevitable part of life’s expression in a material world.
Any true artist will tell you that their works always fall short of expressing their ideals. What’s flawless in the realm of thought picks up debris in its translation to the physical plane. The best we can do is to do the best we can, and then to celebrate how much we create that is good.
When we focus on what’s wrong or lacking or incomplete, our vision narrows, and our spirits contract. We get locked into an imprisoning darkness of criticism, derision, helplessness and pain. But when we focus on the goodness in things, we’re free to ask how we can make it even better. Our creativity is unleashed, we reach for higher possibilities. And thus we grow, and Eden seems not so very far away.
Posted in Happiness Hows, The Nature of Happiness | Tags: Goodness, Growth, Perfection, Perfectionism 
