The Light Gets In
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen (1992)
The metaphor of
light
A page on light.
breaking through into the dark parts of our lives is found repeatedly in song, story and theology. Our lives always seem imperfect, and full of
difficulties
A Tang poem on such troubles.
over which we despair. And then, from the most unlikely direction from the very challenge itself, an unexpected
gift
Tending and hidden compassion.
evaporates that despond. What was a crack in the desired perfection becomes the conduit for elevation, rebirth, light. Shelley offers us
an example
A quote from Shelley's poem.
of such relief given by the natural landscape. And sunsets take up the theme with that flood of glorious light that often comes with the enveloping darkness of
'parting day'.
Evening and the setting sun linked to Gray's Elergy.
The metaphor goes far further, to the idea of a clearing in the wood into which light penetrates; now light becomes the light of consciousness into which the objects of our world
emerge.
On how that new objects emerge.
Leonard Cohen's album 'The Future' has the song Anthem, the quote is part of the chorus. Shelley's poem Written Among the Euganean Hills starts with 'Many a green isle needs must be' and finishes 'And the earth grow young again.'
The picture was taken at Larchhill in Moffat, Scotland, where a bonfire enhanced the sunlight's rays.
Above hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 6th April 2019
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