Rethinking Perfection

The Beauty of Imperfection

By Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

Most of the world’s successful models are pencil thin and for ads in magazines and posters, their faces and bodies are touched up so that they look perfect. Sadly, millions of girls and women measure themselves against these impossible standards and come up short. We saw this recently in America the Beautiful, a documentary by Darryl Roberts. He notes that in 2004 alone, Americans spent 12.4 billion dollars on cosmetic surgery. Mothers are now putting children as young as five on diets or paying for breast implants for their 15-year-old daughters. In Korea, facelifts and other surgeries have reached epidemic numbers. These are but a few of the indicators of a worldwide obsession with physical perfection fueled by the fashion and entertainment industries.

 

Is there another way of looking at all this? The Western ideal of beauty usually salutes things that are perfect, pretty, lasting, or spectacular. But in Japan, there is an emphasis on wabi-sabi, an aesthetic stemming from Taoism and Zen Buddhism that honors the simple and the unpretentious (wabi) and the beauty that comes with age or much use (sabi). In this view, simplicity, naturalness, and fragility are valued. Leonard Koren, author of Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, defines it as “a beauty of all things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is the beauty of things modest and humble. It is the beauty of things unconventional.”

We all have objects in our home that are imperfect and beautiful: an old chair that has been with us for years, a faded tablecloth brought out for special occasions, a piece of jewelry that has been repaired. They all have wabi-sabi. In Dwellings, Linda Hogan recognizes the beauty of imperfection in an old rake:

“My own fragile hand touches the wood, a hand full of my own life, including that which rose each morning early to watch the sun return from the other side of the planet. Over time, these hands will smooth the rake’s wooden handle down to a sheen.”

What an incredible image of beauty: a rake handle worn down through use over the years. We think of other images that make the same point: cancer patients with bald heads, elders with plenty of wrinkles, a dog hobbling valiantly on three legs. We also salute groups of nonprofessionals who are far from perfect but whose spirit is carried in their performance: church choirs, amateur theater troupes, school bands, and local crafts groups. They are living examples of what poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen says in Stranger Music:   Song is Anthem

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg6HKkedhyI

Ring the bells that can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

 

 

In many spiritual traditions, artists deliberately leave a mistake in a handmade object to signify that they know that they cannot make perfection; only God is perfect. We’ve heard this about Navajo rings and Persian rugs. Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh reverences the beauty in garbage. Following his lead, Barbara Ann Kipfer offers this gatha:

“In the garbage, I see beauty. In beautiful things, I see the garbage. One cannot exist without the other.”

The wabi-sabi things of our lives are spiritual teachers opening our eyes to our own impermanence and mortality. You probably have a teapot, a treasured ornament, or some other family heirloom that has been passed down through the generations. It has, as the saying goes, “seen better days,” but it still has the ability to touch your heart.

As a spiritual practice, take one of those items and reflect upon it. What makes it beautiful? Is it a shape, a color, a texture? Do you admire it because it is worn smooth with age? Or is it beautiful because it evokes certain feelings in you? Perhaps it reminds you of the person who gave it to you or shared it with you?

“Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else,” writes Koren. “Beauty can spontaneously occur at any given 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.”

An experience of beauty can also usher us into an amplified appreciation of the divine presence, that “something more” in our existence. Yes, God’s handiwork is evident in the glorious vistas of nature and the beautiful people and things that literally take our breath away. But God is also evident in and through the imperfect, the humble, the modest, and the unconventional. Indeed, these things may be the most accessible samples of divine grace.

 Photographer Thatcher Keats

There is a spirituality in the imperfect world of Keats; he helps us to see, understand, and accept the inescapable imperfection that is the human condition.
Alexander Pope

“The reality, or truth, of your world is imperfection. And the reality, or truth, of your personal state of soul and emotion is your complaint against imperfection. Only by facing the truth and coming to terms with it, facing the reality of both factors, will you have a sound foundation from which you can go on.” –

From Olam Magazine: “The Imperfect Choice”
By Gahl Sasson
We are all created by the same divine blueprint, all labeled “Made In God,” each one of us a split image of the likeness of God. For this reason, mystics warn us not to classify any part of God’s creations as flawed or disabled. . . we are all imperfect in one way or another. And yet these disabilities make us differently able in other ways. It is our imperfections, be they physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual that make us perfect. . .

The areas in our lives where we struggle the most, where we have our disabilities, are the places that provide us with the most lessons and opportunity to expand. In these challenging areas we are more able to learn and develop. It is our mortal coils and disabilities that force us to evolve and become more spiritual.

The place where we experience our afflictions, our disabilities, is where we see God face to face. Our imperfection is our Peniel - our face of God. There are many types of imperfections. I had the honor of meeting at a dinner party two individuals who at birth were diagnosed with Down syndrome. They are supposed to be intellectually inferior to the majority of the population, but in fact the people I met were two remarkable human beings who seemed to be superior in their emotional intellect not only to me but also to most of the people around. They passed from one person to another, addressing their emotional needs, noticing undercurrent feelings that other so called normal people, did not. I was surprised to see how perceptive and psychic they were. The doors of feeling and loving-kindness were wide open before them.
They were talented in the way of the heart. I watched them interact with other folks, the way they played and laughed with children and adults alike. I asked myself, why did these souls choose to reincarnate into that difficult condition?

The psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach begins her book Radical Acceptance (Radical Self-Acceptance on audio CD), about the problem of self-aversion (apparently a uniquely Western phenomenon), with a quote from the Zen Master Dogen: “To be in harmony with the wholeness of things is not to have anxiety over imperfection.” As the most imperfect sort of perfectionist–one who has a perfect ideal somewhere in mind but is either so scared off by it that I don’t get beyond thinking to doing, or doesn’t put in the time with detail to actually perfect something–I was very moved by this notion that trying to live up to perfection is one of the chief factors behind self-hatred. My anxiety has always manifested itself primarily as self-consciousness based in unexamined fears and limiting beliefs that have held me back and stunted developmental progress much of my life. I can’t speak. I’m ineloquent. I have nothing to say. I can’t express myself emotionally. If people really know me, they won’t like me. I’m not good enough. I won’t ever succeed. I have no power. My sexuality or my sexual orientation will be disapproved of. I am a failure. People will either think I’m crazy or an idiot. These ideas have lived so far beyond their time that I feel a certain amount of embarrassment in listing them, along with the relief that comes from recognizing them as, in fact, beliefs rather than realities. The defenses that provide the protective armor shielding me from experiencing these beliefs as actual realities–silence, inaction, isolation, not showing up–keep me from experiment, responsibility, and connection to others.
A few years ago I had a sort of vision of what I now take to be two types of consciousness. In one image was a long-haired barbarian prisoner in a dungeon with hands shackled, raging against his chains, struggling, spit flying, and hair whipping about. Almost immediately an alternative image came to mind of a farmer walking up a hill toward a gnarled oak tree at dawn. Dew was on the grass and mist rolling off the top of the hill. The air was fresh, the outlines of things had a crisp coolness. The farmer was a part of the landscape and the landscape a part of the farmer. The prisoner I have taken since to be an image of the separate self, which is what we feel most attached to when we have anxiety over imperfection, whereas the farmer is an image of the Self, connected to the oneness of things, in harmony with his surroundings. So it seems that the only way to remove the shackles of the prisoner is by recognizing the imperfection that is built into our very nature. Another way of talking about this would be to discuss our sin, or “missing the mark,” although I am hesitant to do so or to use that word because of all the devilish uses to which it has been put. It is perhaps one of the most overloaded and unlovingly, divisively used words of the last millennium. But to paraphrase Dogen, to have anxiety about our sin (our imperfection) is to be out of touch with the wholeness of things. Once when I was behaving badly in some way or other and feeling remorseful, my partner looked at me and said, “Don’t you realize that you are pre-forgiven.” It brought me back from self-isolation into the community of human beings. Forgiveness is discussed today as a process that is as much about ourselves as it is for others, but we shouldn’t forget that it is indeed for others too. We can all do that for each other. We should all be so generous.

Reading
From Olam Magazine: “The Imperfect Choice”
By Gahl Sasson

“Om Mani Padme Hum” is an old Buddhist prayer designed to invoke compassion and unconditioned love. In Tibet they write this mantra on prayer wheels and spin them continuously. These prayer spheres resemble the 10 spheres of the Tree of Life and work in a similar way. The meaning of this prayer is very profound. It translates to “The Jewel is in the Lotus.” The Lotus is a flower that grows in water (the symbol of compassion in Kabbalah as well as Buddhism) out of the mud and dirt. From the darkest and most hidden places the perfect flower emerges. The Jewel is the Pearl. The story of the pearl is the story of the transformation of imperfections and disabilities into a wondrous jewel. The pearl is created when a piece of grit, dirt or sand is caught in the oyster. The oyster, being another profound symbol of compassion, does not discard the piece of dirt nor does it throw it away like we humans do with our garbage and dirt. The oyster caresses it with a layer of white veil. Like a silent kiss, it embraces the dirt, invests in it love and kindness. Slowly, with patience, the piece of worthless dirt becomes a precious pearl.

The oyster teaches us that we need imperfection (the dirt) to create perfection (the pearl). We should treat our imperfections and disabilities the same way the oyster treats the grain of sand. It simply accepts it. Kabbalah in Hebrew means to accept. Kabbalah teaches us how to flow with God’s work by accepting it. The oyster holds that same secret; it teaches us to accept our weaknesses and disabilities. We are perfect in our imperfections; that is the secret paradox of life. What makes us perfect is the ability to grow, and we can only grow if we are not yet perfect. As long as we have some imperfections, we are participating in God’s creation. That is the key of life and that is the Jewel in the Lotus.

Guided Meditation

So now spend some moments and think about your own life, in what areas of your life are you challenged by an imperfection, a disability, a block or a piece of sand. Instead of trying to throw it away, destroy it, curse it, label or deny it, try to accept and love it. From your inner enemy it will be transformed like magic to your inner guide. From your imperfection to your perfection; from your disability to your Jewel.

May all your challenges be transformed into pearls. Amen.

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