How the Light Gets In . . . and Out

Expansion by the artist Paige Bradley.
Read the story behind this sculpture here.

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

For the past few days I have been bombarded by Leonard Cohen's Anthem.  The lyrics come to me in words read in books and spoken by friends, in glimpses of ill-fitting doors and crumbling stone walls. Forgetting, accepting and perhaps even embracing imperfection is an ongoing struggle for me. When I learned that as a 7 on the Enneagram, in times of stress I got to a 1, The Perfectionist, it was a major "a ha, oh s*&!" moment. It gave me a gift of awareness.  When I get frustrated that I'm not perfect, that what I create isn't perfect, I'm not functioning out of my deepest, truest, inner self.

This has been something I've been pondering a lot lately as I get more serious about my writing. I can't just move poems from my head to the page to the world. I have to move them from my heart and my soul as well. It took me a long time to understand  intellectually and viscerally what so called "brave" writing looks like. And it's taking even longer for me to be able to write that way myself.

It helps to read honest, courageous writers. Lately the poets Claire Askew, Kaveh Akbar and Benjamin Garcia have been helping. My friend Randon Billings Noble's essay "The Heart is a Torn Muscle" has helped. Conversations with friends and companions has helped. Sitting in silence has helped.

Sitting in silence has probably helped the most because you can't help but encounter your imperfections there. In the silence the cracks let in light that compels us to peer into those dark and dank corners of our psyche we would rather ignore. It is usually uncomfortable. It is often brutal. And it will likely open even larger cracks but this is the thing I have learned:  the cracks are not only the way the light gets in, they are the way the light gets out.

A One-Circler, Circling Back

My writing totems - a wooden heart gifted by
a community of friends reminds me I'm loved
and supported. A rock painted to look like Julian
of Norwich reminds me all shall be well. The skull
shaped shell is a memento mori for a bit of perspective. 

It's been so long since I've blogged that I've almost forgotten how this works. What I haven't forgotten, however, is that it does work.

At least it works the way I need it to. Some people blog to build an audience or brand, others to build an additional income stream, and a few to build an ego. I blog to build my metaphor muscles. I discovered this recently when looking for something I'd written which had me going back to re-read old posts. In doing so, I noticed how certain writing muscles had gotten slack from not actually putting words on a page with the possibility that someone else other than myself might ever read them. Not that I care if anyone else reads them. But there's something about typing words and sending them out into the virtual universe where they could possibly be visible to other eyes that I find stretches me in a way that my practice of morning pages doesn't.

So here I am, 5:30 am, back at my writing desk and this blog, circling back, which brings me to the title of this post.

Recently I came across the heartbreakingly gorgeous writing of the poet Kaveh Akbar. A recent bout of insomnia has inspired me to spend a few deep hours each night roaming the Twitter universe in search of  poetry to help me navigate the darkness. The other night I stumbled upon a link to an article called "How I Found Poetry in Childhood Prayer" and in doing so, I found not just a beautiful piece of writing but a mirror into my own soul.

The article is well worth reading and Akbar is such a gifted weaver of words that I won't even try to summarize it here. I will, however, share the two lines that awed me the most. The first was this:  "There is no way to divorce my writing life from my spiritual life; that Venn diagram would just be one big circle."  While I suspect many writers feel this way, I think there's something about being shaped by deeply rooted religious rituals and traditions that deeply roots a writer . . . or musician or artist or any creator in mystery and wonder and something bigger than ourselves (and our egos). 

Which brings me to the second line that still brings me to tears and makes my heart break open a little more each time I read it:  "It’s irrelevant if I understand consciously exactly what I am saying, only that I say it urgently enough, speak it with enough beauty of breath and spirit to earn a tiny moment of God’s attention."

Yes. Just . . . yes.