Broken Umbrella

A meditation on direct experience

Photo by Alex Block on Unsplash

This song arose during a rainy day last week, when my favourite umbrella suddenly gave up the ghost. To my surprise, the walk home turned out to be better than expected.

These days, I'm appreciating all wisdom that reminds me to be fully in the moment, to not cling so tightly to comforts and expectations, and to be aware of what Jungian author James Hollis calls "treatment plans"¹…the various ways we try to manage existential anxiety, which can include accumulating more stuff to make life more convenient and also keeping ourselves busy and distracted. (Could writing more songs fall into this pattern? Well, yes.)

Also, I've been thoroughly enjoying a profoundly beautiful new book from Thomas Moore called "The Eloquence of Silence: Surprising Wisdom in Tales of Emptiness”² What if the absence of something, or the "failure" of some mechanism, opened up something new? Where might that lead?

As always, this song is a work-in-progress, with a few lyrics still bouncing around. It seems, to me, to offer a few different interpretations (I welcome yours) and perhaps a few unanswered questions.

Sending you good wishes amidst the storms of these days. (My next song, if it gets finished, will be titled simply “Greed.”)

Love, Lynn

My umbrella broke when I was walking in the rain / I knew I would be soaked when I got back home again / ‘cause my umbrella broke, it was the automatic kind / that lots of rained-on folks / use to keep rain off our mind.

Where are you in the storm these days? / How’re you going to make your way? / How are you in the storm, my love? / How are you holding up?

My umbrella broke, like some flimsy metaphor / that wasn’t so bespoke, though it served me well before / until it couldn’t hold, for something faulty in the spring / that meant it could no longer shelter anything.

(Chorus)

My umbrella broke, so I threw it in the trash / As everybody knows, nothing ever lasts / But then I felt the rain and the wind upon my skin / and something deep inside me sprang to life again…

(Chorus)

1. James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up (2005), 227.

2. 2023, also available widely.