Index

Pacing the Cage

I recently heard a song that just absolutely set me on fire. Bruce Cockburn has a long history of writing meaningful and poetic songs, and one of his classics is “Pacing the Cage” from his 1996 album “The Charity of Night.”

The title alone caught my attention. I have always been known for my pacing, often referred to as a “caged cat” as I was growing up. That impatience has always gone to my core, so it is more than a metaphor. It is the way I am built.

The last verse says it all:

Sometimes the best map will not guide you
You can’t see what’s round the bend
Sometimes the road leads through dark places
Sometimes the darkness is your friend
Today these eyes scan bleached-out land
For the coming of the outbound stage

We are all lost, living moment to moment without any real guidance except what we carry with us. Bruce is quoted as saying:

But in that song, I’m thinking more of finding yourself in a place that you’ve willingly waltzed into. Suddenly, you realize it’s not such a good place to be, and it’s hard to find your way out, hard to know where the next step is supposed to go¹.

For some of us, that is our whole lives.

Footnotes:

1. from “Fire in an Open Hand” by Susan Adams Kauffman, The Other Side magazine, November/December 1999, quoted on The Cockburn Project web page