When the Sun Goes Out

“If the Sun & Moon should Doubt 
They’d immediately Go out.”
– William Blake: Auguries of Innocence*

Dear friends & fam & fellow wayfarers.

Today, where I live, in Toronto, Canada, the sun went out.
Not completely, but just an hours drive or so away, the sun went out completely, for a brief.

I had a ‘1 Thing’ song lined up for Easter weekend (last week) when, metaphorically, the light goes out.
God gets killed.

For those of you not of a Christian inclination or history, Easter is a weekend celebrating the few days through which Jesus is crucified, and dies, and is buried in a ‘rock-hewn tomb’. A couple of days later a group of his followers (all women, BTW) go to the tomb to care for the body and find that the rock is rolled away and the body is gone, and there were two men in ‘dazzling clothes’ who tell them that Jesus didn’t die, he’s ‘risen’ [Luke 23-24].
Basically, so the story goes, Jesus beat Death.

I failed to get the song out on Easter Weekend (…sorry…) but… then… only a week later there’s a solar eclipse. The sun goes out.

The song, which was recorded a long time ago, is about finding some light in the dark, and is heavily influenced by the Easter story. I think its message is that great darkness, and the terribly arduous passages through great darkness can, strangely and paradoxically, generate the conditions necessary for love to emerge, and break through.

—

I recorded ‘Easter Song’ (it’s also called ‘Solstice Song’, because I married it to the longest night of the year) in my buddy Anthony Smith’s kitchen, and you can hear me rocking back and forth in my creaking chair. I mess the lyrics up a little…
I have, since I first wrote it and recorded it, written an alternate or extra last verse:

“Though our hearts be broken,
maybe we’ve even lost hoping,
Oh, but that can be the hard opening,
for love to break free and start flowing.”

* ‘Auguries of Innocence’ (written 1803) is the astonishing poem by William Blake which also opens with possibly his most famous lines,
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour”.

It also includes the verses,
“Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born 
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight 
Some are Born to sweet delight 
Some are Born to Endless Night “
which some of you may recognize from from Jim Morrison singing the verses in the Doors’ evocative song, ‘End of the Night’.

It’s a stunning litany of how the experience (particularly suffering) of living things on this earth is directly connected to, and felt, in the spiritual realm (Heaven & Hell, Cherubim, etc.) and has direct and unexpected karmic outcomes.

Rust stains from paint cans on a steel table.

Easter/Solstice Song

Is there a hint of colour in those dark clouds?
Is there a tinge of blue in that black sky?
Maybe it’s just my imagination,
maybe this hope is just delusion,
but I swear, that I saw, the first ray of dawn.

Oh such a long night,
Oh such a long dark night,
I thought it would never come,
despair gripped me, scattered my bones, I felt forsaken.
But I know I know I know,
never never let go,
‘cause out of the dark,
the lost hope,
despair bears forth the sun.
 
Well you took me to the hard dry places,
you showed me where my weakness is,
through me, through and through,
the cracks and brokenness
redeemed through you.
 
Like any other man,
no better and no worse,
taking a stand and bearing the curse,
in this way staying undefeaten.
 
No winners and no losers,
we’re all in this together,
you and me and me and you,
we’ll come through.
 
We’ll come through, we’ll come through, we’ll come through.
Though now we’re lost we shall be found,
though now we’re last we shall be first,
though our sins be scarlet, they shall be whiter than snow…

[Though our hearts be broken,
maybe we’ve even lost hoping,
Oh, but that can be the hard opening,
for love to break free and start flowing]