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.