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. 

Veriditas is Contagious

The Scribe in the Woods (9th century or earlier, Ireland)
A hedge of trees surrounds me, a blackbird's lay sings to me,
praise I shall not conceal.
Above my lined book the trilling of birds sings to me.
A clear-voiced cuckoo sings to me in a gray cloak
from the tops of bushes,
May the Lord save me from Judgment;
well do I write under the greenwood.

This morning I stumbled into an unexpected free hour to write, so I parked myself on my favorite bench on the outskirts of the Bishop's Garden and got to work. I feel affinity for the anonymous Irish poet who wrote well under the greenwood, for I too, find I write well when underneath a tree.

I was pondering this while listening to the robin who landed on a branch beside me when it dawned on me that maybe it's because veriditas is contagious.

That greening, life-giving energy of the Spirit that Rhineland mystic Hildegard of Bingen sang praises to is palpable on days like today. If I look long and hard enough, I swear I can see the grass growing and the periwinkle petals of the columbines unfurling.

With nature getting about its work, I somehow find it easier to do the same-- without worrying about perfectionism or fretting about outcomes, without judging myself or comparing myself to others. Hopefully this infection is one for which there is no cure.

#Adventword Day 25: Love

Touched by an Angel by Maya Angelou
We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free. 

#Adventword Day 24: Delight

MINDFUL by Mary Oliver from Why I Wake Early (Beacon Press)
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for—
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant—
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these—
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

#Adventword Day 23: #Relate

Today's poem and picture is courtesy of the Howard Thurman Facebook page.

— from The Mood of Christmas by Howard Thurman

Where refugees seek deliverance that never comes,
and the heart consumes itself, if it would live,
Where little children age before their time,

And life wears down the edges of the mind, 
Where the old man sits with mind grown cold,

While bones and sinew, blood and cell, go slowly down to death,
Where fear companions each day's life,
And Perfect Love seems long delayed.
CHRISTMAS IS WAITING TO BE BORN:
In you, in me, in all mankind." 

#Adventword Day 22: Ask

Prayers: I by Kadya Molodowsky trans. by Kathryn Hellerstein
Don’t let me fall
As a stone falls upon the hard ground.
And don’t let my hands become dry
As the twigs of a tree
When the wind beats down the last leaves.
And when the storm raises dust from the earth
With anger and howling,
Don’t let me become the last fly
Trembling terrified on a windowpane.
Don’t let me fall.
I have asked for so much,
But as a blade of your grass in a distant wild field
Lets drop a seed in the lap of the earth
And dies away,
Sow in me your living breath,
As you sow a seed in the earth.

On our pilgrimage to northern Wales we asked for blessings on our work 

and made votive offerings at Llyn Cerrig Bach.