How the Light Gets In

Broken things.

I have been monitoring the situation in the US, not because I can do much - or anything, for that matter - about it, but to bear witness.

Yesterday was a tough day for me.  I struggled to come to grips with what I was seeing and how hopeless and helpless I felt.

I watched Mr. Trudeau struggle to say something when asked for his reaction and felt...the same.  There were simply no words.

As he spoke about our own problem with racism, I knew that he was correct.  Even he has foot dragged on implementing measures that would assist the aboriginal communities.  Even though he is not actively trying to kill Canadians, he needs to address the wrongs that have historically been present ever since white people arrived on the shores of this continent.

But the stories coming out of the US got worse and worse as the day went on and finally I had to go to the studio and get away from it all.

Me and my white privilege, sitting at the loom thinking.  Feeling.

Artists tend to say or show what other people cannot find the words for and eventually Leonard Cohen's lyrics came to me:

Forget your perfect offering.  There is a crack in everything.  That's how the light gets in.

And I thought about the Japanese methods of mending broken things.  Not to erase the break, the crack, but to show that the object had at one time been broken.  And mended.  And maybe even made more beautiful as a result.

We have an opportunity right now as a society.  We can look, open eyed, at the state of the world and we can choose.  We can choose to see systemic racism and how we have been conditioned to punch down instead of up.  We can choose to address the inequity that underlies our systems.  We personally may not be guilty of setting these systems up, but as a white person my life has not been made more difficult by the colour of my skin.

It is far beyond time that human beings stopped letting the level of melanin or the shape of someone's eyes or nose be the determining factor in whether or not that person is 'worthy'.

If you are white and not sure where to begin, I will recommend again that you Google Jane Elliott.  I have linked to a video on You Tube previously - it isn't hard to find.  Listen to what she has to say.  Ask yourself the question - are you willing to be treated like a Person of Colour is treated in our society?  If not, why not?  If not, then you know that they are not treated equally, equitably.

Let us mend our society.  Let us make it more beautiful by how we mend it.

Edited to add link to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's blog