Life has been generous with her lessons of late that educate the side of me who thinks she does and should have control over personal, nonnegotiable standards for excellence, responsibility, presence and reliability. I have lived by these standards for most of my adult life and have taken them extremely seriously, without fail. Lately my brain has malfunctioned in a couple of instances – erased data that had just been there. These incidents seem to come in the turmoil of big changes presenting themselves which have the effect of adjusting schedules and scrambling attention.

I remember well learning from C.G. Jung that he believes that perfection is the masculine desideratum, while wholeness is that of the feminine. In the East the Divine Mother is often pictured with a veil over her eyes, as she does not look upon the flaws of her children, but rather sees and loves them just as they are.

Learning to work with inevitable mistakes and imperfections as expression and embrace of our humanity, even as honest revelations and signals regarding flaws in nature and human nature as divine revelations of how things actually are in the universe; this would be the feminine approach to wisdom. Wholeness, holding equally together all the parts of the efforts, including those that fail or screw up badly, have a place in the complete expression of our efforts and our learning. To split off impefection and jump only to the perceived perfection is to miss a LOT of what the teaching pieces are.

“There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.” – Leonard Cohen