This one is by my dear friend Joel McKerrow. You must go and visit his HUMAN exhibition. It's art and poetry and music, and profound. It's based on the enneagram types, each poem written for those blanketed in each specific number. I don't actually know that much about the enneagram, but I do know that a part of me is every single one of them. When I read his poems they all touch something in me. Like the one below. I read this and see a dance, a dance with art, a dance with our partners. The struggle and forgiveness and fortitude that keeps us carrying on. "Giving grace to the smudged things," as Joel writes. Just beautiful.
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One: Imperfect She has been staring at this painting, the one that she created, the one with with the smudge right there, that smear in the corner, ‘Don’t you see it’ she demands, ‘Can’t you see it?’ These days, she cannot see anything else. And he knows there must be a way, to take the something and make it better, to take the effort and correct it, take the blemish and resurrect it into masterpiece and meticulous… this is not miraculous, it is scrupulous persistence. But these days, he cannot see anything else. So with the awareness of a fox, she has tuned her eyes acute to see, the mistakes done by you, and these flawed notions of me… The insufficiencies of she. He put on glasses just to recognise, to magnify, the imperfection, a microscope on the broken. But don’t we need them, pawing away at the inconsistencies, when the rest of us just want to ignore the discordance, who is she to disregard it, to let the frayed stay that way, who is he to let the seams break, ripped and split and tattered. She takes up needle and thread... just to knit the world back together. Through diligence and determination he will mend their lives one stitch at a time, fix this world one fracture after another, a list that he can organise, tick off the problems until they are not so, repair everything imperfect to its proper state of prestige. And do not tell her when she drops a stitch, don’t think for a moment she cannot see this. She has chastised her fingers, And told them they must do better. And the pressure how it pushes And to stop would be a hindrance… And sometimes it feels too much as the anger and the bitter and the blame froths violent beneath the surface. Sinking slowly, grace enfolding, this begins with...self-forgiveness. Could they begin this, learning how to take and to praise all of their persistence to honour all of the scrupulous, to commend the thorough and the meticulous and acclaim the audacity of their belief that these things must be better, we must do better, and yet still… to forgive when we do not. To let the fox of our passion take off the glasses of our scrutiny, Just for a moment. Let her live wild for a short time. Giving grace to the smudged things, Generosity to the frayed, An open hand toward the cracked and the scratched, and the imperfect in the other, but especially so to the imperfect in herself, in himself, in ourselves.