**I’ve gotten emails to put the essay that inspired the blog, or rather explains the title, where it can be found more easily**

IMPERFECT BEAUTY

by Kelly Bowron

Even though I have more reason than some and less than others to understand how tenuous and fragile life is, how precious it is for its very fragility–I forget sometimes. I also forget how beautiful and strong the human body is–even more so in its flawed forms. Like trees struck by lightening, damaged, deformed, that twist around and grow towards the sun into stunning sculptures of resiliency. There is a Japanese term “Wabi-sabi” that identifies the beauty in things that are “imperfect, impermanent, incomplete”. It’s more than something that is imperfect but still beautiful, but an understanding that some things are even more beautiful because of their imperfections.

We live in a day and age where a mother can sit in a doctor’s office and look in stunning, 3D detail at the bones and organs of her son–can watch it spin and turn at the click of a mouse, travel down the trachea and into the lungs and see all the details once upon a time people never dreamed of seeing–and maybe were never meant to see. Something shifts, painful and raw, in seeing with such clarity the tangle of abnormally formed ribs and a spine once straight curve, twist, and bend. In the wake of the pain, though, in the long pause of a breath stifled then regained–there is an awareness of awe. That a body struggles against such odds, shifts and adjusts itself, accommodating and maximizing its strengths. One airway lost and the other takes up the slack, breathing in and out with a steadiness of purpose. “Put one foot in front of the other,” Kris Kringle sings to the snow monster [or the Wizard, as has been pointed out to me], and the body does, just moves along with what is and works to the best of its ability. There is a simple, graceful beauty in the curve of a spine–an imperfect, albeit dangerous, beauty.

It is no wonder that Buddhists love the image of a lotus blossom, rising out of the mud, fed not by perfectly balanced soil and fertilizers but by the muck at the bottom of shifting, murky waters. It reminds me of the medieval concept of the wheel of fate and the idea of people tied to that said wheel, sometimes swung up to good fortune at the top, sometimes dropping down to bad fortune at the bottom, sometimes on the upswing, sometimes on the downswing. I think we often live for those moments of perceived perfection at the top, floating like the lotus and soaking up the sun–but life isn’t just the top of the flower, it’s down deep in the roots and the muck too, and in between on the long stem shifting nutrients back and forth. Life is the high moments and the low moments and the beautifully boring moments in between. It’s in a daughter’s turned up nose and cleft chin and ginormous big toe; in a son’s bright blue eyes and graceful hands and imperfect body. Life is all about kid’s dressed up and lip syncing to “Secret Agent Man” and a brother and sister leaning their heads together on a hospital bed playing “Final Fantasy” while waiting for one to go back to an operating room–life is dirty and painful and sunlit and joyous and sometimes it’s all of them tangled up into one.

Philip Simmons, who had, and eventually died from, ALS, wrote in his book Learning to Fall:

Don’t talk to me about flowers and sunshine and waterfalls; this is the ground in which life sows the seeds of our fulfillment. The imperfect is our paradise.

Let us pray then that we do not shun the struggle. May we attend with mindfulness, generosity, and compassion to all that is broken in our lives. May we live fully in each flawed and too human moment, and thereby gain the victory.