The World is Perfect (I sometimes forget)
The World is Perfect (I sometimes forget)
I’m a recovering perfectionist, you see. So sometimes I forget the world is perfect.
Yesterday was one of those days. It was a day off and I bumbled about the city, struck by how many times people “made mistakes”: not noticing others, forgetting, feeling slighted (and that was just me.)
For some reason, the imperfection got into my skin—I pondered it all day, including into when I wanted to be sleeping. (You can bet your boots I thought about the imperfection of the unanswered need for sleep.)
This morning I read a poem from “Why I Wake Early.”
“I would like to wrote a poem about the world that has in it
nothing fancy.
But it seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open
and becomes a star.
The ants bore into the peony bud and there is the dark
pinprick will of sweetness.
As for the stones on the beach, forget it.
Each one could be set in gold.
So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds
were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence
as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we’re not too
hurried to hear it.
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too,
and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,
so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.” ~Mary Oliver
And I cried.
I cried at the beauty of the world and the beings in it. I cried because I sometimes forget I am one of those perfect beings.
