One day I happened to overhear a good friend of mine – one of the most generous and selflessly giving people I know – beating up on herself unmercifully. She was spazzing about how she had fallen down off her (very high) standards-of-conduct bar because she had not stopped to listen (yet again) to a high-maintenance friend’s continuing saga about how everybody was picking on her and how not-right everything in her life was.
As a Perfectionist in remission, I am here to tell you that wabi-sabi — a Japanese way of seeing the world — works as an antidote to the never-good-enough, shiny-new-thing madness induced by the classical hyper-focus on perfection and the kind of seamless orderliness that arises from the mathematical, mechanical precision that evolved in the super-industrialized Occidental West where more is always better. I grew up in a pineapple plantation camp on Molokai. Many of my neighbors were Issei, first-generation…
It is heartening for me to see the world-wide burgeoning of another sort of rebellion against the very real effects of the post-modern aftermath of our narcissistic phase of dominion and domination over nature, where we humans felt entitled to willy-nilly pave over the world and dump our stuff all over the place to make yet another ugly. They call it “guerilla gardening” and it continues to expand all over the globe.
James Ray is a Google+ poet buddy who came looking for me. It was grand getting connected with him again. The demise of Google+ was a sad day for the poets who were having fun playing around with each other in it. I asked James to share a poem with us. He sent this heartful free-form poem as well as the back story. James says, “I have written my whole life, but never as much and never as public. Yet…
