General Learning • Tenneson Woolf

December 21, 2016

There Is A Crack In Everything

Leonard Cohen was a Canadian singer, songwriter, poet, and icon. He’s one that got better, in a different way, with age. There was something in his deep, simple, stripped down, minimalist way that felt genius to me. And comforting.

Leonard Cohen died in November, after sixty years in the business. Tributes have been many.

For me, “Hallelujah” and “I’m Your Man” keep playing in my head. I find myself humming and singing them. My voice seems to go naturally deeper when I do.

It’s these lyrics, however, that a friend recently reminded me of.

Put down you perfect offering.
Ring the bell that still can ring.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

Here’s to celebrating the cracks. The cracks in the perfect story that can often imprison as much as inspire. The cracks in the perfect career that sometimes point us in a very different and unanticipated direction. The jaggly cracks in our closest relationships that can feel like lighting to the heart, painfully and excitingly. The cracks in are hallowed assumptions that release us from how things “should be” to how they are. The cracks through which light can’t help but bend its rays through.

December 20, 2016

Harmony Project, Ohio

This is spectacular.

For it’s “voice giving.” For the simplicity of “we are not trying to show the world what to do; we are showing them who we are.” For it’s model of community service. For it’s playfulness. For it’s seriousness. For it’s vitality.

It’s a CBS report by Jane Pauley, featuring an effusive David Brown. Seven minutes.

Thank you Meg Wheatley and Phil Cass for sharing.

December 19, 2016

There Are Very Few Who Find The Center

I appreciate this quote from Kabir, the 15th century Indian poet and mystic, offered by a participant from our recent series on “Engaging Shadow.” In particular, the stirring and the invocation to find a center. The stirring of the human psyche that seeks attachment and certainty so easily. The invocation, and remembering that there is a center to find, perhaps more inhabited with uncertainty.

Friend, please tell me what I can do about these

ever-changing dramas I keep spinning out?

I gave up my fashionable clothes & had a robe made,

but I noticed the cloth was well-woven.

I traded the fine cloth for worn burlap

But I still threw it elegantly over my left shoulder.

I tried to forget my sexual longings

And now I feel angry a lot.

I gave up rage and now I feel greedy all day.

I worked hard at dissolving the greed

And now I am proud of myself.

When the mind tries to break its link with one thing

It clings to another thing.

Kabir says, Listen, my friend, there are very few who find the center.

December 15, 2016

John and Farouk in Advent

This is such a beautiful and thoughtful post by my friend Charles LaFond, a minister in the Episcopal tradition. It is about stuck patterns. It is about wildly different perceptions. It is about common heart. Reading it made me involuntarily stop in my day to be still.

Here’s a snippet. Read the whole thing on Charles’ blog post.

Let’s say that the average, run-of-the-mill guy in Iraq were given a pen and paper and asked to write about the average run-of-the-mill American. As an American man, I expect that when I read what the Iraqi guy wrote I would disagree. I would read his writing and I would say “no!” I would say “That is not an accurate picture of the average American man!”

The Iraqi man, Farouk, let’s call him, is writing from his perspective. He is wiring from his cinder-block house half-built and partly exposed to the elements, but with parts covered with metal sheets he found by a road and a blue tarp. His anger at the death of his two sons and his daughter’s undiagnosed disease would enflame his writing. His wife’s bent exhaustion from trying to keep his other four children and their parents and his brother and her three sisters fed would further exhaust and enrage him. His work moving rocks for a local construction company would anger his hard, cracked hands as he wrote his angry words. This is not the life he wants….