Happy New Year

[Keith]

What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human  
possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I  
think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with  
this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos  
of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if s/he did the  
world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint  
dissolves the chaos even for him/herself, for there is something  
arrogant and warlike in the notion of a wo/man setting the universe  
in order. It is a kind of balance that is his/her glory. S/he rides  
the drifts like an escaped ski. His/her course is the caress of the  
hill. His/her track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its  
particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him/her so  
loves the world that s/he gives him/herself to the laws of gravity  
and chance. Far from flying with the angels, s/he traces with the  
fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody  
landscape. His/her house is dangerous and finite, but s/he is at home  
in the world. S/he can love the shape of human beings, the fine and  
twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such wo/men,  
such balancing monsters of love.

      -- Leonard Cohen (from his novel, _Beautiful Losers_)