Celebrating the Navajo Blanket (and Its Deliberate Imperfections)

Photo by Boston Public Library

I said in my article Getting in the Groove: “The creative mind can be a blessing and a curse,” which was to say that while having the talent to create is a magnificent thing, it is sometimes difficult to know where to start, or, once begun, when to finish. This article is about the state of mind when coming to the ‘finish line.’

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Once your creativity has taken hold and you feel good about the direction you are going, the hard part, all too often, then becomes when do I stop?

Picasso was credited as saying, “You’re never finished with a work of art, you just abandon it.”

That is true for me when I paint. It’s hard not to want to keep touching the paint, moving it around or adding more, which oftentimes ends up muddying the purer colors, and I think, why didn’t I just leave it alone?

But I don’t think Picasso’s philosophy works as well with those who write, especially if the person feels they have a lot to say.

I have read rather thick tomes when the author seemed not to have noted Picasso’s words, or who may have been long dead before those words were spoken, who thought he/she was doing the world a favor by gracing minds with an abundance of special words that, really, became not only redundant, but tedious, and definitely not needed to the reader. He/she could have easily given the world a greater gift by chopping out half of the wordy prose to make a more enjoyable and less lengthy and time-consuming piece of literature. But that’s just my opinion.

However, where does one stop, when there is so much to say or express when wanting your creation to be perfect?

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I was chatting with my facilitator about Picasso’s words. Each of us giving our opinions, and he, my well-read mentor, asked if I knew the story behind the Navajo blanket.

Photo by Jaime Handley

I told him that I had gone to school with some Navajo kids when I was young, living in southern Utah, and had the opportunity to watch blankets being woven, but I didn’t remember, from that young age, anything especially significant about them, so didn’t know to what he might be referring.

He told me that to the very spiritual Navajos, Gods are the only perfect beings and feel that nothing on earth could be as perfect. Thus, to honor the Gods, the weavers would deliberately leave a stitch unfinished or make an otherwise perfect pattern imperfect, when weaving their blankets.

I looked up ‘Navajo Banket’s-Imperfections’ and the information in the articles made sense to me.

I liked the fact that the Navajo’s deliberate imperfections were not only honoring the Gods but honoring themselves with less stress in their everyday lives by striving for excellence, but not perfection. That concept should be inspiring to all of us.

The fact that we, or at least many of us, tend to want perfection, and work hard striving for it, instead, why not embrace the Navajo’s way of thinking and accept the fact that nothing can ever be perfect? Why should we waste valuable time thinking that we can? Many of us spend way too much time trying to make things perfect, therefore, missing out on a lot of important things in our lives.

I decided to spend time a bit more wisely on other important things, instead of trying to make perfect everything I do, and then feel bad when I can’t make it happen. Perhaps most of us wouldn’t waste so much time and effort if we all had the philosophy of ‘doing the best that we can’, move on, and continue making things in our lives ‘good’ because we’d know there would be no grief over not getting things quite so perfect.

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I also learned, while talking to my mentor, that the Navajos aren’t the only culture with philosophies on perfection. The Japanese, too, celebrate imperfection with their Wabi-Sabi philosophy. They believe that since all things in life are imperfect, incomplete, and impermanent, they feel that to seek excellence is good, but to seek perfection is pointless. They look for the beauty in the imperfections that life is made of in all its stages and are happier people because they are more accepting of those imperfections.

And so, like the Navajos and the Japanese, in whatever we set out to do, why not simply strive for excellence, accept the fact that whatever we do will not be perfect and that’s okay? Leaving a thread undone, a paint stroke not completed, a musical stanza left vibrating, or an ending to your story stopped before redundancy sets in is…

Photo by Jocelyn Morales