Life’s Imperfections

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

Leonard Cohen

Okay, I admit it. We have more dogs than we should. Four to be exact. But what’s the alternative? Our animals needed homes. They found us. We found them. It was fate.

We make it work. Thank God for Becky, the housekeeper that comes every other week. I know I am spoiled. Without her, we would be buried in a sea of fur and dust. She speaks passionate Spanish to our dog children and they reply with wagging tails and happy barks. They absolutely love her.

There is nothing perfect about our life any more than there is nothing perfect about the garden. It is riddled with imperfections. Weeds, bugs, fungi, you name it, it is all there. Life without it would mean something else. I am not sure that something else is what I want. Bugs mostly get free reign. My knees and back ache from pulling weeds. They keep coming back, of course.

There is also nothing perfect about my journey into painting. I keep learning with each painting the art of patience and observation. Layers of color give depth and new meaning. If you stop early on, you never see the unveiling of a story that the painting is trying to tell. The garden is no different. Both are telling us to stay the course and persist. We will learn something new about ourselves with each step. Never give up.

We should pay heed to the same lesson in all areas of our lives. We can try to protect ourselves and those we love from the hurts inherent in life’s scheme, but it is not always wise. It is often better to learn to exist with life’s imperfections. We become stronger people from those challenges. Not perfect, perhaps, but at the end of the day, the rose cannot be truly seen without the thorn that injured us on the way to finding the flower’s bloom.