Four-Leaf Clover
🎶 … I’m looking over a four-leaf clover
That I overlooked before … 🎶
One morning my dog Luci & I were walking past a yard that had clover growing amid the grass. As Luci sniffed, I instinctively started looking for a four-leaf clover. We were there only a few seconds, but as Luci signaled her eagerness to move on, I noticed I was humming “I’m looking over a four-leaf clover that I overlooked before.” Walking home, I began thinking about the good luck that is supposed to accompany finding, rather than overlooking, a four-leaf clover.
Back at my computer, a little research showed me that there are many clover-like plants, some of which bear four leaves, some even more. But the cultivar in question, the trifolium repens, or white clover, has only three leaves - except when a rare genetic/environmental aberration produces a fourth leaf. The odds of finding one are said to be about 1 in 10,000. While it’s unknown where the legend of luck originated, surely it’s safe to say that finding one would tend to make one feel lucky.
But think about it for a moment: here’s an aberration, essentially a defect, that instead of being reviled or rejected, is actually sought after and celebrated for the goodness it might bring. How unlike the way we usually consider human aberrations. Consider how often you may have judged the personal idiosyncrasies, the physical size and shape, the intelligence and talent (or of lack thereof), the speech, the mistakes of another. Even if you’re able to overlook them, do you see them as good fortune? Not likely. And how about in yourself? Many of us judge our own shortcomings even more harshly, perhaps hoping that others will overlook them, and likely trying desperately to ignore them, hide them, obliterate or reform them.
Can you imagine looking differently at that which you judge, seeing it instead as you might see a four-leaf clover? Could you consider that the fourth leaf of your clover might possibly be a gift, a blessing in disguise? If it were, what would that goodness be? What is there to learn from it, to grow through it? What if accepting and even embracing that very thing you judge as wrong and bad about you - or others - could hold the keys to your liberation, your joy, your being more fully alive than ever before?
In my own life, I can point to how I now gratefully use my sensitivity to support others rather than judging how easily I cry. In breaking my back, I learned countless lessons about trusting my inner knower, and about asking for help and receiving it. My quick temper? It’s becoming a tool to sharpen my awareness and healing of hurt rather than to strike out. I’m learning to use my irritations about others to refine what I want to improve in myself.
I know you can do this too, and you already have. No doubt there've been incidents in your life and aspects of yourself that you've judged as terrible aberrations, yet some of them you’ve learned to accept and manage, and actually grow from and through. Perhaps you’ve even grown to the place you can now talk about what they taught you, perhaps laugh about them, and maybe even have gratitude for them. Maybe your “aberrations” were major by anyone’s standards, or invisible to all but you, but for sure they seemed huge and frightful to you at some time. But as you’ve come to accept them - realizing that no amount of judgment changes what is, you’ve found a way to use them FOR you, and to incorporate them into who you have become. All of those aberrations? No, of course not. But you do know you know how to do it. You know that it’s possible to find goodness even in what seems so totally wrong.
So if you’re overlooking the value in that fourth leaf of the otherwise perfect clover that is you and your life, if you’re trying to try to ignore, deny or bypass the aberrations that offend you, you might want to pause and take a second look. You might want to look for the good that it can bring you, in a way that possibly nothing else can. Rather than trying to overlook it, change it, or get rid of it, find what there is in it to learn from and love.
I could say a lot more, but instead I’ll offer you the lyrics to the cheery song:
I’m looking over a four-leaf clover that I overlooked before.
One leaf is sunshine, the second is rain.
Third is the roses that grow in the lane.
No need explaining, the one remaining
Is somebody I adore.
(Lyrics Mort Dixon, 1927)
See if you can identify what the sunshine, rain, and roses are in your life; and see if you can find in yourself the one to adore. If you do, I’m betting you’ll soon have a field full of four leaf clovers.
I’d love to hear what you find! And by the way, if you’d like to hear Willie Nelson’s wonderfully funky version of the song, here ya go: