“There’s a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.” — Leonard Cohen

It was winter and I was mad.

“You can’t play with us,” my brother said, tossing rubber pucks on our backyard rink. I waved my stick around and skated backwards. I pointed to my Canadians jersey as further proof. He shook his head, “No girls.”

I leaned on dejection and my short hockey stick at center ice.

Hung from a white pine, the rink light illuminated twirling snowflakes. Instinctively, I raised my mitten hand as they settled on a soft landing. I levitated away from a child with child problems. Melancholy paused, I was mesmerized by stacking crystalline structures of needles, columns and ferns. This is my first memory of rejection.

–

By the pricking of my thumbs

–

On the short list of books I reread each year is “Watership Down,” by Richard Adams. In this critically acclaimed epic fantasy, a clairvoyant rabbit, Fiver, foretells the coming destruction of the seemingly safe Sandleford Warren. The Chief Rabbit dismisses Fiver’s prediction, because the message of “an ominous feeling” didn’t register with old school logic of the Owsla military police. Fiver was a nervous rabbit who didn’t sound like authority. He was small and timid, but he was right. Fiver led a small group of believers to create a new home, and the warren brutally destroyed.

Rejection is rarely loud. I did not fit the boys-only requirement. Fiver was a commoner with no rank, and the Chief Rabbit had “real” issues. The USA women’s hockey team won gold, but still found their legitimacy an addendum to the “real” Olympic story. When the administration congratulated the men’s Olympic team and quipped he would have to invite the women too, or he’d “be impeached,” the remark catalyzed sycophantic laughter, as if inclusion were a punchline rather than an honor.

In that moment, recognition arrived sideways, framed as obligation rather than respect. In each case, authority did not rage, it shrugged. And the shrug is colder than anger. Across time and place, the same principle applied: authority determines who belongs — whether a backyard rink, a warren, or a country’s national stage.

Lately, the bed doesn’t feel right. When national leaders diminish women athletes, immigrants, journalists or dissenters, it creates a draft under the door. None of our homes feel right.

The body is a home as is a house, an apartment, a yurt or a mansion. The space where we dwell with family, through time and feelings, is home. The community is home and so is the country.

Space can be home, a lake, a path you walked, or your favorite bodega. Home is also the inbetween.

We have all felt displaced. Physical refuge matters, but emotional shelter is built in showing up. The rabbits in “Watership Down” form a found family, creating survival bonds along a dangerous path. The National Women’s hockey team forged the same connection, enduring pay gaps, dismissive remarks and the constant reminder that they were “less than.” We all find home in the spaces between.

A few years ago, I was under the weather, and scared. My body was in a dark, untethered space. It was way past visiting hours, and my husband was whisper-reading a long article by Curt Stager on the history of the Adirondacks. His proximal deep voice and the article were an anchor. At that moment, Kris was my center. He was a reminder that refuge is not only walls or a roof, but the attention of someone who meets you where you are.

Even when the world turns inhospitable, we can create boundaries. We can be both patriotic and disappointed. We can feel the draft and admire the snowflakes. I learned to lean into the dark and find solace.

Like rabbits, I too was raised with little light.