The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

Okay, folks. Okay folks so

new new biography I saw of just reviewed of Leonard Cohen, who I sat with a little bit at a Zen center in LA.

And so this is what,

this is how this biography begins.

Leonard Cohen's art derives from a very specific visual acuity. He sees men fall and with them women, saints and angels.

Hence a fascination for falling bodies in a career devoted to a methodical and quasi-hammarous

exploration of the

exploration of the laws of gravity, his subject, how and why we fall from what heights,

along what trajectory is.

His stated goal to assert with required rigor the unfathomable beauty of falling bodies,

armed with the visionary force that alone makes you see the world exactly as it is, he

sharpened his tools along the way, a voice so deep it leaves us charred, a terse and increasingly lethal writing

style, and his unique combination of angst, Jewish mystic mysticism and Christian and Buddhist flirtations.

Along the way he fashioned a world that is uniquely his own yet a lot like ours.

Quite predictably, the result is ferocious.

Songs that comfort us with little waltzes but are also spiritual weapons that aim for the heart and

never miss.

What do they say?

What we already know. The invincible gravity of existence that we die, that

our heart cooks and sizzles like shish-gab in our breasts, that the

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