The maple leaf in my hand was perfectly imperfect. Mostly autumn brown, there was still a little green threading through it with just the slightest markings and dirt on it to make it just slightly imperfect. Perfectly imperfect. This leaf I selected was a final step in a guided exercise at a spiritual retreat I was attending. We were told to find something in nature, something to cast into the water of the stream flowing behind the retreat center. This ‘something’ would be the carrier for releasing those limiting beliefs that tend to hold us back from fully and deeply living. This maple leaf would take with it into the river my perfectionism and self-criticism and judgment. I worried the leaf was too pretty for such a task, but I didn’t change my mind. The leaf was just imperfect enough. 

I watched as my fellow retreat attendees walked with such reverence for their chosen items. So quiet, so reflective, each in our own little world as we approached the River of Surrender.  I imagined as I started to walk toward the river that I was Taylor Swift, in a flowy Folklore/Evermore dress, long cloak, walking specifically in beat to her music, my imperfect maple leaf becoming a glowing orb, and my fellow seekers peripheral background dancers. Though my hair is short and brown, I could feel the breeze in my long blond hair, the sleeves of my hoodie transforming into billowy soft fabric as I bid adieu to this leaf – the leaf embedded with the belief in perfectionism and the need to hide and protect myself. 

In reality, I dodged the yellow jackets buzzing along the ground, slid slightly in patches of mud as I made my way through soggy ground to the river’s edge, and when I cast the leaf to the river, it caught a breeze and gently glided back to me, landing softly at my feet.  I tried again, and this time it landed on the edge of the water, tangled within a tree root. Not in the water, no; but on the soggy mud at the edge. An edge that would surely take me down should I step toward that darn leaf to liberate it (and my limiting beliefs, damn it!) for another toss toward the water. Instead, I reached for a branch on the ground to push that leaf into the current, but the twig was still attached to some deep root in the ground! And did I mention yellow jackets? 

This was not going to plan. This was not the vision of In my Surrender Era I imagined it would be. 

And then I laughed. How appropriate that nothing about this exercise of releasing perfection went perfectly! I’m not Taylor Swift, I’m not in a flowy dress draping a young, thin body with cascading blond hair – I’m a middle aged woman in an overweight body wearing khaki cargos and Nikes caked in mud. No special effects lighting, no wind machine, no sure-footed choreography, no backup dancers. It took everything I had not to slide in the mud and avoid the sting-y bugs. 

Perfectly imperfect. This moment, this realization, this body, this time in my life, this metaphoric casting away of life-long insecurity and behavior. Perfectly imperfect. And because it was, I remember it all too well. 

I release the need to be humanly perfect and replace it with Self-Love: that Love that makes all things Good, even the muck; the Love that knows only perfection and does not judge what we humans call flaws; the Love that sees beauty and grace (and humor) in the experience of imperfection, for it is experiencing the missteps that we course correct. 

I release the need to hide and replace it with Freedom: honest vulnerability, uninhibited expression, unapologetic Being; permission to try, to fail, to try again; permission to imagine and wonder and get curious; permission to get my shoes muddy as I slip and slide on life’s messy, marvelous riverbanks.

Permission to laugh. To delight. To feel. To breathe. To BE.

Perfectly imperfect.