Ring the Bells That Still Can Ring

Ring the bells that still can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

My friend Christine sent me a bell for my bicycle. Not just any bell, either, but a lime green one with pink flowers. I mounted it on my handlebar this morning and rolled down the hill jingling, feeling frisky and cheerful and ten years old. I figured it would be a good alert for the mountain lions that I always imagine are lurking at the edge of things – here I come, don’t be startled, let’s not surprise each other. But in truth no rationale was necessary. It’s a bell. It’s fun to ring.

Back at the middle school where I was a teacher, a big clanging iron bell was used to mark the end of recess.

I loved recess and the way it sometimes spilled over into class time, not excessively, but just enough to know that we were not about to suffocate under a rigid and oppressive schedule. We were an enlightened group, you see, and we knew that academics were important but play was a priority too, and schoolyard exploration, as well as tree climbing and pogo stick jumping, if that’s what had to happen. And we believed that the social interactions that took place during recess were a part of learning for students and staff. But then Linda would suddenly lookup from a conversation by the picnic table or poke her head out of her office and ask some hapless soul to ring the bell. Now that one was a bad news bell, and I hated to be the ringer.

Butt his bicycle bell is juvenile joy. It’s my spurs that jingle jangle jingle as I go riding merrily along. It’s goofy and affirmative and it’s lime green and it makes me smile. 

Last night we were in Goleta directly beneath the wildfire that has been raging off West Camino Cielo Road. Dubbed the Gap Fire, it seemed to intensify with a disconcerting suddenness. The sky took on that eerie light that we have come to know too well, the sun was a bright red disk, and blizzards of ash swirled around us. The power went out all over town and we could see bursts of bright flames shooting upward from the mountains. And then of course there came the familiar sense of vulnerability, the mounting sense of worry, the premonition of loss.

The mutability and evanescence of life. How many ways is the message given?

I see it all around me.

Earlier in the week, a surfer drowned out here.

“He died in the saddle,” says a rancher friend, “doing what he loved. It’s what all old cowboys hope for.”

Unfortunately, he wasn’t very old. 

And I didn’t know him, but I thought of him this morning asI stood on a bluff and looked out onto the ocean.

At my feet the bones of some tiny creature lay bleaching in the sun and in the sky a flock of pelicans scattered and soared and a whisper of smoke lingered in the air and I got back on my bike and rang my little lime green bell and it tolls for me and thee.