A Perfectly Flawed Garden

Last spring, I noticed something about how I viewed my garden. After a long day, I would walk around and look at the plants. This sounds relaxing on paper, but I was looking at the plants that weren’t there yet, or the weeds that I hadn’t gotten to yet, or a fungus here, an aphid there. I was not really looking at my garden at all! I was looking at a series of potentials and flaws and responsibilities. Meanwhile, there was much more that was beautiful and right about the garden in real time. After some effort, I learned to sit and look at all of the garden: the blooms, the tender shoots, the lady bugs, the butterflies, as well as the flaws. I found out that the beauty was outweighing the flaws by quite a lot.

In life, we often look at ourselves as if we are just a series of flaws and things to improve. We may look in the mirror and see a dot-to-dot of blemishes, rather than looking at our whole face. We might home in solely on parts of our bodies that we dislike, until we can see only flaws and nothing else. If a cartoon were to be drawn of our flaw-focused approach to ourselves, it may be quite funny. Maybe there would be a giant nose with a pimple mounted upon a gigantic disembodied butt or belly, with no arms, hands, legs, eyes, etc.

It might take some effort, but if we can shine awareness upon our tendency to see ourselves only through our flaws, we can then learn to expand our awareness to our selves as whole, complex and beautiful creatures. We all have some flaws, but there is so much more to us than that, and it is well worth it to learn to see our whole picture!