11.13.16

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in. —Leonard Cohen, Anthem

“Of all days, of all years. What a time for one of music’s greatest, wisest and kindest points of light to go dark.”  (LA Times, August Brown).

As I’ve hunkered down in my bunker this past week, shrouded in dense fog, the airwaves have been filled with his music.  I’ve not been able to listen to his final album, So You Want it Darker, but to sit with “Hallelujah” is to honor my sadness.   The fog lifted late yesterday afternoon and I went down to the dock with the kitties at my feet.  The winds were shifting across the top of the water and the weathervane was spinning back and forth.  I watched a flock of geese skim the top of the water and I heard the haunting cry of a distant loon.  A point of light came down through the clouds.   In the night, the supermoon flooded my bed with bright white light, and I moved every time I was awake, to have it bathe my face.

A big weather change is finally on its way, with possible snow showers later in the week.  I’ll water my chrysanthemum out on the porch for the last time today so I can enjoy a few more days of burnt orange glow.  As I told Sarah yesterday, we will not always feel this way.  It will change.  We can’t know what comes next.  As Rumi wrote in his poem, The Guest House:

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture…

Leonard Cohen tell us “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”