It all depends on how you look at it!

A Large White Butterfly, also known as a Cabbage White

Flying Crooked

The butterfly, the cabbage white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has — who knows so well as I?
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

(Robert Graves)

I love this poem by Robert Graves. He starts of by saying that the Cabbage White is a dunce who can’t even fly straight – and of course, society says flying straight is the norm, right? But by the end of the poem, he has changed his attitude completely and says that far from being a dunce, the Cabbage White is actually a genius, gifted in flying crooked, which is something even the most aerobatic haven’t been able to achieve! It reminds me of that quote that is attributed to Einstein, ‘Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid’.

The message is clear – change the way you look at people, and that includes yourself! Everyone, including YOU and ME, is gifted! Everyone is valuable and can make a contribution to this world we live in. There are no dunces here!

Thanks for visiting Time to Reflect and for reflecting with me.

(All pictures and words on this site are copyright of Terry Yarrow unless otherwise stated)