flower perfection

My new neighborhood in Broomfield can’t be beat if one is a walker.  All the streets have beautiful, well-maintained sidewalks tucked in from the road with groomed lawns and luscious deciduous trees lining the edge. But still more walkways and trails can be found intersecting the land behind the houses, winding their way beyond traffic into worlds all their own. I’ve especially enjoyed these paths this week while Mac visits from Washington. Though his stay is just a week, we’ve made the most of our time to walk, talk, and inevitably get lost, grateful for the GPS in our phones.

Along these walks I’ve come across a lovely assortment of flowers blooming over people’s white picket fences and brushing us on our way by.  I don’t having ever encountered these particular plants so they are all that more sweet to me. They have become a symbol of true perfection.

Yes, this might sound cliché, but it only occurred to me as I passed by several times what wisdom I can find in a flower. Lately I’ve been pondering the idea of perfection and right and wrong. I don’t believe these necessarily fit in tandem with each other, but such are the terms and realities society and my personal reflections have landed on. If the choice isn’t good it must be wrong. Right decisions are to be sought and wrong ones avoided.  But when I look at flowers I don’t see right or wrong blooms.  Some might be bigger or fuller or brighter, but these qualifiers do not make them right or wrong. They simply illustrate difference in beauty for so bud is anything but lovely. What generosity in judgment! Flowers inherently have beauty as a quality and cannot be called right or wrong.

My ah-ha moment tells me to do the same with myself and others. People are inherently beautiful, loveable, and a thing to be admired. My decisions and actions might be off the mark, but my being, ME, is not right or wrong. It’s different variations of lovely.  With this perspective of who I am and then the rest of humanity, I might be able to look with more generous eyes.  First I can put away judgment. Then I can take closer peeks into the created perfection of each individual.