A poetic meditation on Leonard Cohen’s “Boogie Street” and the return to embodied presence.
“O Crown of Light, O Darkened One…”
From the very first line, Leonard Cohen opens the door to the paradox — and then quietly walks us through it. Boogie Street isn’t a place in the ordinary sense. It’s a passageway, a threshold, a reentry point into the world after the vision, the awakening, the kiss of the sacred. And it’s there, in the mundane rhythm of the traffic jam and the tidied kitchenette, that Cohen shows us what realization really means.
Boogie Street is not the mountaintop where saints dwell or the monastery where silence reigns. It’s the street corner, the subway, the kitchen sink. It’s the old banjo and the cigarette smoke. It’s the place where you come back to yourself — fully, irreversibly — after you’ve touched the Infinite.
“I’m what I am, and what I am,
Is back on Boogie Street.”
This isn’t resignation. It’s revelation. To be “what I am” is not to fall short of divinity — it is to embody it, without adornment or escape. This is mastery, not mythology. Cohen, ever the poet of paradox, offers it without sermon or structure — only a sip of wine, a quiet exit, and the soft murmur of the street below — where the sacred dons human skin.
In Cohen’s world, “the street” often represents the domain of the human, the flesh, the fall — but not in a pejorative sense. Rather, it is where divinity humbles itself into experience. It’s not separate from the holy; it’s where holiness breathes.
The Return to the World: A Master’s Movement
Many traditions speak of transcending the world, but Cohen — like Yeshua, like Kuthumi, like Mary Magdalene — shows us the return. The real test of realization isn’t in how high you climb, but in how wholly you can return — without losing yourself, without pretending, without grasping for the robes of old illusions.
This is Boogie Street. It’s not just where we live — it’s where we learn to be.
“By such instructions you prepare
A man for Boogie Street.”
The verse describing the rivers, the waterfall, the kneeling to dry her feet — it’s almost Magdalene-like in its intimacy. Like the Gospel of Mary, where presence and tenderness become the initiation. That tenderness is the crucible. Beauty awakens us, not through force, but through undoing. Through presence. Through love that cannot be explained. The instructions are not written in books — they are carved into us through experience.
And then… we return. Changed. Humbled. Embodied.
So Lightly Here: The Breath Between
“So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear.”
In just a few lines, Cohen distills what takes some mystics lifetimes to say. This moment, this breath, this street — it’s not meant to be escaped. It’s meant to be entered fully, lovingly, fleetingly.
We are not here to save the world. We are here to witness it. To feel it. To embody what cannot be explained. And in that, to disappear — not in the sense of vanishing, but of merging with the mystery. This is the movement of the realized Master — not to escape the chaos, but to breathe through it. To exist not in opposition, but in presence.
“Tho’ all the maps of blood and flesh
Are posted on the door,
There’s no one who has told us yet
What Boogie Street is for.”
And maybe no one will. Because Boogie Street isn’t for something. It is.
It is where the Crown of Light meets the Darkened One. Where the holy and the human kiss. Where the realized Master steps back into life not to teach, but to live.
And that — that is enough.
Take a breath. You’re already on Boogie Street.
“Boogie Street”
Written by Sharon Robinson
O Crown of Light, O Darkened One,
I never thought we’d meet.
You kiss my lips, and then it’s done:
I’m back on Boogie Street.
A sip of wine, a cigarette,
And then it’s time to go.
I tidied up the kitchenette;
I tuned the old banjo.
I’m wanted at the traffic-jam.
They’re saving me a seat.
I’m what I am, and what I am,
Is back on Boogie Street.
And O my love, I still recall
The pleasures that we knew;
The rivers and the waterfall,
Wherein I bathed with you.
Bewildered by your beauty there,
I’d kneel to dry your feet.
By such instructions you prepare
A man for Boogie Street.
O Crown of Light, O Darkened One…
So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear.
Tho’ all the maps of blood and flesh
Are posted on the door,
There’s no one who has told us yet
What Boogie Street is for.
O Crown of Light, O Darkened One,
I never thought we’d meet.
You kiss my lips, and then it’s done:
I’m back on Boogie Street.
A sip of wine, a cigarette,
And then it’s time to go . . .