True Confession: I’m in groupie love for the first time.
Groupie love is a bit more discreet for a “mature” woman because the mere idea of jumping up and down while screaming is exhausting.
Last year, an introduction to the work of Leonard Cohen shifted my world. This man’s music can reduce me to tears. Poet, author, musician, monk and an even bigger surprise, artist. I’m swooning over an (almost) octogenarian.
Sylvie Simmon’s book I’m Your Man chronicles the life of Leonard Cohen. Wading through the early years of sex, drugs, etc. I was wondering why I’d chosen to spend my time on this fellow. Then we hit Cohen’s middle years. The seeker. The modern mystic. The monk. The man with the guts to go back to work at seventy to recoup retirement stolen by a trusted friend.
In “Dance Me To The End of Love” Cohen absorbed a heinous world event and metabolized it until he found beauty for the victims, writing a melody so evocative people choose it for their wedding song ~ when in truth the lyrics honor the musicians who were forced to play and watch as loved ones were marched to the gas chambers in Nazi death camps.
Leonard Cohen has given me the great gift of a new way to perceive. Holding dichotomies in the same resonance without blame is the beginning of peace, a springboard for creativity.