Your Perfect Offering

Snow is falling right now on Central Park, and just a few minutes ago, I was out in it with ma chienne (I am teaching her "Asseyez!"). I brought a tennis ball with me, but the powder was so fresh that every time I threw it, it disappeared, swallowed up in the vast whiteness. She couldn't follow it, so I wound up going after it. Which one of us is the retriever here? Eventually, we just ran around.

Walking home, I looked at our tracks and felt that somehow we had ruined the snow's perfection, just as I was sure that we we got into the apartment, paw prints would sully the kitchen's white tiles.

And then I thought of these lines from Leonard Cohen's "Anthem", which I'd never really appreciated until I saw him live:

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

The unblemished sacrifice mandated by Leviticus is not perfection; the desire to make things whole, while recognizing that they will always break, is where dawn begins.