Sometimes the most revolutionary thing you can do is stop trying
Stop trying so damn hard to be clever, to be loveable, to be worthy of friendship, to be cherished
Stop working to fill the potholes and empty spaces in the heart with community
Stop striving to get needs met, stop setting up the conditions for it to all come together
Sometimes the most revolutionary action is simply to sit
And trust
That we will be loved anyway
That just getting up in the morning and going about our daily business is all that is needed for kindness to flow in
That our needs will be met in the most surprising of ways and those that don’t get met will keep
That love doesn’t need to be earned and that it simply is and will be without any effort.
Sometimes that most revolutionary thought is that you don’t need to kick to be carried, to float with ease in the arms of the world.
Sometime the most revolutionary cry is
I AM ENOUGH.
Can I open my arms to embrace this revolution? Let it seep into my bones? Can you?
Today is the 1st anniversary of my divorce from Juan. Its both hard and easy to believe that a full year has passed since the courts made it official, since the judge signed the papers, since I was able to let go at another level. Of all the stories I have written about loving Juan and the process of losing him, this is my favorite. It seems appropriate to post here again. Its made it into a couple of my best hits compilations. Apologies to those who have seen it before and don’t want to read it again. New writing is coming soon. I promise.
It was an unusually warm April day. We were standing in the park. It was a Saturday but we were working–the way people in Washington, DC do. But because it was Saturday we could give ourselves a break from the relentless pace and walk around the block. We stopped in the park and stood about three inches away from each other and talked, the way we had been talking for months, about life and family and justice and my married lover and movies. Suddenly the skies opened up and it started to pour. I barely heard him over the thunder. “You know I love you, right?” he said. “Yes” I said, slipping my hand into his. The next moment before we kiss stretches infinitely out before us. Spacious. Open. At that moment everything in my life changes.
********
He slipped the key into the lock and it turned. We couldn’t believe it was ours, this house. It felt like a palace. After the studio apartment where he spent almost every night and then the one bedroom basement in Mount Pleasant that we shared, the openess seemed like a metaphor. Our whole lives lay out before us–full of possibility and hope. He rolled around the floor and I took pictures. We dragged in paint cans and ladders along with a suitcase full of dreams and made love on the drop cloths.
********
I was rolled up in a ball–scared, terrified. I was eight months pregnant and I realized that when I had this baby he might just love it more than me. I had never been loved so deeply before in my life and for the first time ever I had felt rooted and at home. I was scared, so scared that it would all start to shift away from me once there was this little person around–this child I so desperately wanted. I would become second in his eyes. I would fail as a mother and he would love me less. The tears started to drip off my chin. He wrapped his arms around me and promised me it would never come true. He would always love me. Always. And I knew he was right.
********
The day they placed Max in my arms. I knew I had it all wrong. He would never stop loving me.
********
There are endless stretches of no sleep. There are short words. There is postpartum depression. There are chores that don’t get done. There is frustration. There is unhappiness that creeps into every corner of the house. There is a child that consumes both of us and leaves so very little left. We have nothing to give each other.
But we try. We rally and laugh and delight in this child we created together. We hold hands and share our stories of him. We find our way back to each others bodies at night. We tell ourselves that love will get us through, that we are a team. We make plans and we dream. We convince ourselves it is going to be OK.
********
But work is hard. Life is hard. There is so much falling apart around us we don’t know how to start holding it all up. When we go out for dinner we are so tired we can do nothing more than stare at each other.
We love each other madly even though it is beginning to feel that love may not be enough.
********
The day he tells me he is leaving me, everything inside my body goes cold. I can’t breathe. Everything stops working and then starts working in reverse. And then stops again. The walls that just five years before had seemed so widely spaced are closing in on me. Our two year old was sound asleep in his room. How did it come to this?
We could figure this out. We always could figure it out. I beg him. Lets figure it out.
********
Nine months later, the air is so heavy in our house I cannot breathe. “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to stay. I can’t do the hard work. I can’t figure it out,” he says. “I can’t believe this is us, falling apart this way.”
We are sitting three inches apart from one another. “You know I love you, right?” he says to me as he pulls his hand from mine and gets ready to walk out the door. “Yes,” I say but I am not sure he hears me. He kisses me too quickly and in an instant my life has changed again.
******
I have everything I wanted out of this divorce settlement. There was no fight. It is sketched out on a napkin at a Lebanese restaurant. We promise we would be our best for each other, for him–the only one each of us truly knew how to love at this moment. After years of disappointing each other so deeply I wonder if this was yet another empty promise. I try to so hard to forgive–to forgive him, to forgive myself, to forgive love for not being enough.
********
I need to bring my marriage certificate to court on Friday. I finally bring myself to dig it out of my files. Sometime last year I had moved it from M for marriage to D for divorce. I pull out the file. There is only one certified copy left. I need a certified copy for the court. I make a mental note to write the County and request another for my file. And then it dawns on me that this is the last time I will never need a certified copy of this document ever again. I don’t need to write the County. I put my head in my hands and the reality of the last 4 years hits me like a truck.
********
I move in and out of my day. I am so blessed. My life is a good one. I have beautiful friends, I have not been without love for one day in this whole journey–not one. I laugh every day now–genuine hearty spontaneous belly laughs. I wrap my arms around my dearest girlfriends–soul sisters who understand my heart and giggle with me until 3am. My life is messy but I am bowled over by the stark beauty of it. I am better for this journey I have taken. I am wiser and slower and kinder and gentler. I know that I would not have this–this community, this love of life, this appreciation for slowness, this knowledge of the depths of my heart had he stayed and pretended, but I can’t help but say to anyone who will listen, “I don’t recommend divorce. I say stay. Stay. Stay.”
********
I sit and play my guitar but my fingers don’t want to work on this right now. They want to twine themselves in the hands of someone I once thought I would never live without. I stop and don’t even notice that I have. ”You’ve stopped” my friend says. “Sorry” I say and I mumble something about how I was frustrated with myself. ”I want to start again”. The metaphor hits me like a ton of bricks. I want to start again. Yes–I want to go back to the moment in April when the air hung hot and the thunder clap almost drowned him out. Before I knew how it would all turn out. I want to rewind the movie and play the beginning over and over again.
Despite the thousands of ways he has found to disappoint me, I still love him.
********
I can’t live with him anymore. I don’t want to.
I remember this fact and look at my friend. I look at the guitar in my lap. I think about the richness of my life, about the gorgeous details in this tapestry that is my life. It all turned out exactly as it should have. I have everything I need.
So I pick the guitar back up. I apologize for my bad mood and rotten attitude. For the somewhat wasted lesson.
My friend launches into a spiel about how its the middle of the second period and there is another period and a half to go and you might be getting your ass kicked but you still have to put your head down and tough it out and play and hope you learn something for the next game. I want to kick him out so I can have a good cry but I know that he, with his icehockey metaphors, is right. Wait for the final buzzer I tell myself. I put my head down and I play so soft thunder would drown it out.
******
He plays Tom Waits. And then he plays another song–a song I believe I have known since before I was born. He knows I love it and he wants to cheer me up and he does– a little. I hug him–it is time for him to go. I tell him as he packs up that Friday is the day. “I know” he says. “Its hard”. There is nothing more to say than that–and I silently thank him for not trying to say more.
********
I sit in the dark and wrap my arms around myself. I breathe in and out the truth–the honest truth. I love my life, with its ups and its downs. I love the strength I have discovered in myself. I love my friends, my urban family and the rhythm of this community we have created with shared meals and Eric’s homemade key lime pie and Jackie on my cell phone and Stephen in my office making fun of me. I love Barbara with her laughter and Jen with her schemes and Jeff with his music and Cathy with her cup of coffee and the kids begging me to stay for dinner or take them to icecream. I love my housemate with her fancy salads. I love my job, even when I have to fight with my colleagues. I love raising Max more than I have loved anything else in the world. The truth is I am giving birth to a life that I love more than anything I have ever loved and I couldn’t do it without losing my marriage.
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And I know, honestly, that I would walk this path over and over just again to sit here in this moment right now. The moon is full and I am incredibly happy even as I am sad.
********
“You know I love you, right?” I whisper to noone in particular–to the moon, to my sleeping son–to myself. I feel the words vibrate around the room before they finally settles on the couch next to me and slip between my fingers. The moment both stands still and passes quickly. And I tumble on, head over heels in love with whatever will come next.
For the last 4 years, since becoming a single parent, I have always felt as though I was within something like 20 paces of falling off the edge of the cliff, the cliff that marks my the boundaries of sanity.
At first it felt scary, to be so close to falling apart. But then I realized that 20 paces is really quite a ways a way. After awhile it felt quite comfortable. Even as I knew that it could all unravel quite quickly, I knew that it most likely wouldn’t.
There are times when I move closer, within 10 paces or even 5 of the edge. Those times initially felt scary too. The wind is stronger here and I can smell the dangersous dropoff but I have survived moving so close so many times that it feels old hat. I know 5 paces is still 5 paces and one step backwards is all that is needed to get me back to 6.
But lately, the last week or so, I have been perched with my toes curled up against the edge, gripping with every last bit of strength—channeling it all down to the tiny muscles in my pinky toes. Its not a trauma that pushed me to the edge. Instead I am just the daily business of keeping it together, through winter, through Max’s latest bouts of separation anxiety and the flu, through the battle with a house which is slowly falling apart, dissolving into a pile of broken toys and popcorn crumbs and dirty laundry and dust, Four years of trying so hard to do the work of two parents, to build a community that fills the holes in our hearts, of striving and working and being solution focused. Its got me worn out and in my exhausted stupor I stumbled like a drunk to the edge where I stand now, holding my arms out for balance and crying out “Whoa…”.
The other night as I was dropping off Max’s playdate, and running to the store to pick up the M&M’s Max needed for a graphing project, I thought if I don’t ask for help I am going to fall apart, literally, figuratively. Asking for help is hard and while I feel I have pushed past all my fears and the taboos that I carried, I still wince when I need to ask.
And truth, unlike the help I needed in the past the help I need now makes me feel so much more vulnerable. I didn’t need a babysitter. I don’t need someone to cook me a meal or give my kid a ride. What I need is a hug from someone who loves me, who sees me, who isn’t trying to change one bit of me or hope that I am someone other than I am. I need someone to appreciate me, celebrate me, tell me why they cherish me. Oh…and I need someone to sit on my couch and drink a glass of wine while I clean, cause I need to restore order to this house and I have been having a hard time settling. I need someone to help me settle.
I wonder if I can whisper wishes so precious and vulnerable out to the world? Can I ask my community to fill in this way? Even just a few people–my closest and dearest friend or two? Is it too much? I know these are needs that so many of us have unmet. If I ask, do I give permission for others to ask too…Do I open up a door where we all start unsurfacing our most vulnerable needs exposing them to the air where they can be met? Or… do I risk creating resentment and hurt during a time when everyone is so stressed, by the economy, by illness, by their own demons that feels so much bigger than my exhaustion.
Post script: I wrote this piece last week but never posted–The frantic pace of being stuck kept me from making it to my blog. And then I asked. Not wide and far but within a very tiny circle. And like a magic carpet that request swept me away to safety. I will continue to ask, because I know how easy it is to know that perch and when I am ready I will write what I learned along the way.
Something came over me last night. It was blown in by the howling winds, the ones that roared and growled and shook the trees. I didn’t see it coming, still don’t know where it came from. This must have been me at 13, sulky and petulant with a little bit of sass, pushing back and out for no good reason. Completely uncomfortable in her own skin. Ambivalent and wavering and not sure of what she wants. Not sure of where she is going. Not even sure why she is here.
I normally have a pretty good sense of the why and how of my moods shift, and what is going on in my heart. I normally know why I lose patience or feel frustrated or want to be alone. I normally can explain and hold it all in tenderness, but this time I can only shrug my shoulders. Somethings just are beyond explanation.
I sat on the couch in silence in this space when I was interrupted by Max, sleepwalking. He was panicked and calling my name. “Mama,” he cried looking right at me, “Where are you?” “Right here mijito…right here” I replied.
Three times I had to call him, to wake him up. Three times it took to wake me back up again too. The me that feels like me. He climbed into my lap and I held him close up against my chest, happy to have found us both. Happy to be home.
It never fails to surprise me. It creeps up on me and shocks the hell out of me. Just when I think that I have become fearless, just when I think I have overcome my deepest darkest fears, just when I think that I have done my soul work and gotten an A+ on the lesson, then I realize how terribly scared I still am.
Does it ever end as we peel away, layer by layer the protective walls we put around our hearts? It seems that no matter, how much work I do, its still there, more and more subtle but there. This fearfulness.
Shortly after my marriage failed, I found feng shui. After suffering such a devestating loss, after feeling so adrift, after realizing there was no security in this thing called marriage, I found a sense of control and order. If I could just eliminate the clutter, if I could place the bamboo just so, if I could figure out the flow of energy in this house I could be safe. I spent long hours, arranging, planning, sorting…and desperately holding on to a vision that my life would be OK.
At other times, it would be my job, my money, my community, my life as a mother, my writing and creativity, my spiritual journey, even this blog… a long line of things that made me feel anchored and safe. One by one I transform each into a security blanket the thing that would keep that fear at bay. The fear of being here. All. Alone.
And over and over again I would learn, the more that I grasp at these things, the more they slip through my fingers like water, proving to me again and again that while each one of these things delights, my security comes from none of them.
They are false idols, lined up in the temple of my heart–I deify them and doom them to failure. They will not save me. Over and over again I learn that really, its just me. And my faith.
Yup… in the ends its just me. As rich as my life is, there is nothing to grasp onto but what is here in my heart and my faith. No matter how hard I try, I cannot be anchored for life is a river and it is sweeping me along and carrying me, pulling me moving me. And that scares the hell out of me.
But make no mistake. This is not a sad or desperate post.
Because I am breathing sweet free air of liberation. I can stop looking for the thing that is going to save me. I can stop waiting for it to delivered and come along. I can stop fearing that it will all disappear if I say or do the wrong thing. I have it, have always had it, will always have it, right here in my heart.
I am the thing that saves me.
I am so unpracticed at this way of being.
So I will stumble along and when I trip, I will reach for something to steady myself but when it disappears into thin air I will not feel the bruising crash of my body slamming down, but the steadiness of my hand against the ground. Catching myself.
When my little family was breaking up, I realized I could feel adrift and alone or I could adopt the whole world as my family. I could recognize how tangled our roots are, even as we look like separate trees, even separate gardens above the surface.
Every now and again, when the whole world is contracting in, closing tight around around the nuclear and I start to drift again I need to remind myself what lies below the surface. I need to remind myself of the connections between us–the ways that you and I all share the same earth, draw from the same water. If you dig beneath our roots are entwined.
Choosing to live this way can be hard, especially when I feel like I just might be the only one who believes in life beneath the surface, the place where all this connection is at hand. Sometimes I feel like the neighborhood wacko who is caught up in a dream that is not quite real. Efforts to draw distinctions cut deep. This is mine. That is yours. We are separate.
Whenever I feel this me/you/us/them/in/out/ dynamic at work it rocks my world. So much so that I wake up at night with a headache. It breaks open my heart. It makes me gasp for breath. And its not because of some big cosmic world view of community and peace in the world.
But it’s simply because it was the knowledge that we are all connected, that my family is big and wide that saved me when the illusion of my little family dissolved.
Lately, I have been finding shining little bits of myself, from Boston to North Carolina, alive and well in the love of friendships long dormant. Just at a time when I was wondering if I was a crazy old lady dreaming of life in the earth, if the connectedness I had been counting on was yet another illusion, I am finding that the connections go longer and farther and deeper than I dreamed.
I choose to believe in these connections, even when others try and tell me otherwise. When someone wants to contain us as a unit I will simply smile. I know what lies beneath the surface. I believe in it. I do.
Buck up, bear down, dig in and wait it out.
Find the silver lining.
Shift perspective-see the lesson–trust the reason.
Hold it all lightly. Claim its all interesting.
Say it is living
Know that it is dying.
Slam the door. Shout at the moon.
Kick and scream and don’t go easy.
Cry. Flail. Blame. Plead.
Dance. Sing. Weep. Laugh.
Build walls. Tear them down.
Sweep up dirt. Air out laundry.
Notice. See. Listen. Question.
None of this changes anything. Nothing changes anything but the passing of time.
And even time makes no promises.
I used to think that if I got it right, if I learned my lessons, if I bore my lot with dignity that I would be rewarded. Rewarded with rest.
I used to think that if I slayed the gremlins, if I journeyed bravely, if I kept up in the storms that I would find the Holy Grail and would be rewarded. Rewarded with some peace.
I used to think that if I somehow figured it out, that if I unlocked the mystery, that if I mastered the game there would be a magic transformation and all would be easier, simpler, picture perfect
Yet, it seems that the reward is really practice.
Practice in order to buck up, bear down, dig in and wait it out….
again and again and again.
It is raining now. A steady cold autumn rain. The kind that spoils camping trips and calls for hot tea and warm blankets and stacks of movies. Max is sick and has a sinus infection on top of an ear infection on top of something dreary and medieval sounding called Hand Food and Mouth disease. We are burrowing in.
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A few weeks ago I had a dream. I don’t remember much about it. It was fuzzy, almost impressionistic–blurry and not clear. The only thing I remember from this dream is staring out a window watching the rain, remarking “The women who have loved me are dying…” At the time I had the dream, I viewed it as a Jungian metaphor. I thought that at this time of great transition, I was letting go of all the various parts of me who had served me before, who had done their best to protect my tender heart but who now had seen their time end: The me who was afraid to love too deeply, the me who felt she had to do everything perfectly and be perfectly nice so that she would be adored, the me who felt she needed to plan out and control her life. Yes…I thought. These versions of me, they are dying and from their ashes a strong, secure, adventurous woman who is not afraid to love fearlessly is starting to rise.
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Our dear housemate Odette has been in the hospital for almost 3 weeks now. She is not dying but she is struggling to heal from a life changing surgery. She has been in and out of the hospital and holed up in her bed since labor day. I realize how much of our day-to-day life, functioning and running smoothly, has been made possible because of Odette’s quiet presence. In my efforts to keep our life together with her gone I am running at double speed, flailing around and unable to go and visit. I miss her and feel her slipping away. I feel a hole in my heart where her lilting African singing used to be.
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My dear friend Jenni is so ill and in so much pain. She had pinned her hopes on a surgery that was not successful. I am angry and sad because I don’t know how to get halfway across the world to hold her hand. I want to sit on a beach with her and wrap my arms around her and I feel that if I could something just might shift for both of us. I am not sure what I can do anymore that will make a difference.
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This week I learned that my dear Jill, a friend who held me through the early days of my divorce with Juan, has cancer. We don’t know any details yet. There are tests, there are possibilities, there is lots of unknowing. I am sitting on the edge of her wide circle and wondering what if anything I can do to help. Thursday I learned that Antonieta, Max’s babysitter and third grandmother, my second mother, the woman who has been my steady day to day presence for four years through the worst of our separation, the one who wiped so many tears, the one who put cold cloths on my migraine ravaged head, the one who took my child when I needed to cry, I learned that she has an aggressive form of cancer. She has no health insurance. We don’t know what is next.
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“The women who have loved me are dying.” Suddenly this dream I had takes on a new scary meaning and as I stare out the window and watch the world turn impressionistic and blurry through the rain I wonder what it means.
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I am bowing to life exactly as it is. Its a minute by minute– no, more like breath to breath– exercise, this not wishing it was otherwise. Not wishing that it wasn’t raining…not wishing that we were camping…not wishing that Max felt well…not wishing we could be with other people…not wishing that Odette, Jenni, Jill, and Antonieta were well and sitting around my kitchen table sharing a bottle of wine and laughing with me right now…not wishing that I didn’t just eat an entire box of chocolates to dull the sting around my heart…not wishing that I was already an acupuncturist so that I could do something to help…why can’t I do anything to help?
It is raining, we aren’t camping, Max feels crummy and we can’t be around people lest we pass along the horrible virus that has left him with sores on his hands, feet and mouth. Most importantly many of the women who have loved me so well are sick and I don’t know what to do about it except eat a box of chocolate–so much so that now I can’t sleep. I don’t have needles to help them and I am years off from being able to and I feel so damn helpless in the face of this all. Wishing wouldn’t change any of this.
I frantically text my community and beg them to bring movies so I can distract myself this night. As though they are all in cahoots with the universe, they have set their phones aside so late, forcing me to sit here on the front steps, watching the rain and breathing through my grief.
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This is life, as it is.
This is the rain, cold and wet.
These are my tears warm and salty.
This is life.
I took a two day class at Tai Sophia this past weekend. It meant leaving the house by 8 am each day and not returning home until after well after 5:30. The class was thought provoking and heart softenting. It was a restful, restorative way for me to spend my 48 hours away from work. And it had real consequences for Max, the only child of a single mother.
Max, precious Max, spent his weekend being traded like a card, being passed off, being neither here nor there in the middle of everyone’s very busy schedule.
Sunday morning found Max at his friend Jake’s house. He was picked up by his dad who shepherded him to his swimming class and then took him for lunch. Juan dropped him off with my friend Michelle who took him with her kids to the park for a couple of hours. Michelle then dropped him off with his favorite teenage babysitter Katherine. By the time I reached him it was almost dinner time and he had been in the care of no fewer than four different families.
One of my friends was worried about Max’s day. She thought Max would feel fractured and discombobulated. Insecure and unrooted. At loose ends and a little unloved. She had me a little concerned too.
Yet, something interesting happened. When I picked Max up he was glowing. It was clear that Sunday had been one of his favoritest days ever. As he recounted his day it was clear that he had experienced it not as an orphan being shuffled around but rather as beloved child being passed gently from one set of waiting arms to another. He had experienced it as one big epic adventure. His conclusion was that our community was wide and deep–that he was well loved–that there were many experiences to be lived–that he could trust many.
It amazes me how the very same set of facts could elicit such different interpretations. It reminds me that our lives are really just stories, and while we have little control over many of the events in our lives we do have the power to write our own stories about what happened as those events unfolded. Max could have written a story about being left by his mother and schleped about no one having more than a few hours to give him. Instead he chose to write a story about adventure, deep love and a community who cherishes him and shares him. I would like to think he wrote a bigger story, a story that was wide and deep enough to protect him versus one that was shallow and left him feeling vulnerable.
Children are such brilliant storytellers. They find a way to breathe magic and good into any set of events–that is until we teach them otherwise when we pass on our own tiny stories. When we teach them that their stories are fantastical and dare I say wrong.
Too often I find myself living in my smallish little stories. I go about believing them for no other reason than its because I always have. They are convenient, automatic and don’t take much brainpower. But oh…when I look under the hood of my tender sweet soul and I see how these stories drain my heart of its power.
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One of our favorite games here at work, when Stephen, and I are bored and distracted, is to imagine what Winne the Pooh characters we might be that day. So often he is Tigger with boundless energy. I used to frequently be Piglet, often fretting but buzzy too, sometime I am Kanga nurturing and sweet. At times I have been Rabbit, with his schemes and his plans and his bossy nature but lately I have felt that I am Christopher Robin. Does he even really count as a character? He has cool boots but is pretty much on the sidelines of the story, unimportant and relatively uninvolved. That’s me, I tell myself over and over again. The one that doesn’t matter, who is doing so little to keep this ship afloat, the one who is sitting on the sidelines. It wasn’t until one of my favorite colleagues said to me yesterday that she was Christopher Robin that I could see how to breathe into a different story. Suddenly I saw my own “Christopher Robin-hood” in a new light. For Christopher is the one who carries all the animals of the Hundred Acre Woods as beloveds. He holds the space. Without his love there would be no story. He is quiet and still but his love breathes life into those woods. Just, dare I say it, like me.
*******
I have to admit, I have stopped and started this post, wondering where on earth this is going, how on earth I can conclude. With a call to action? With yet another reminder to myself to be more like my son, with yet another set of words that sneakily tell me that I am something less than perfect exactly as I am.
It gives me pause, this dilemma, this koan, this questioning, this holding of stories that expand not contract. Is there any way to end at story about stories? Is there any other way than this….
And she lived happily ever after.
the lesson of the falling leaves
the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god.
i agree with the leaves.
-Lucille Clifton
It is autumn. The leaves are painted, and even though they are more muted and muddy here so close to the city they are nevertheless dazzling me with their red and gold. And even now they are starting to drift down gently and rest upon the lawn. A man just knocked on my door and asked if I needed someone to rake my leaves. From now until December they will come, the leaf rakers, and I will break down and hire them, one after another, to clear my lawn, the one that had been so well shaded by the huge oaks that surround my property. But today I say, “No thank you”. Perhaps the trees are ready to let go of their leaves, but me I am still not ready.
In Chinese medicine, autumn is considered the season of grief and letting go. It is the season of pruning away all that is not needed, so as to better prepare the way for the deep dark winter of unknowing. It is the season that we, I, must admit that as the bounty of the late summer goes into storage the full, ripe time is done.
I have been reflecting on all the ways I hold on, to the joyful summer, to my attachments, to my expectations. I realize now that the trees are calling to me to join them. Life is now calling me into a place of letting go.
I am also realizing that I am not well practiced at the art of letting go. When I am faced with a goodbye or a retreat, I fight it. And, of course I lose that fight every time. The autumn comes. The leaves go. People move on. Life changes, always changes. The trees grow dormant and rest, preparing to be brilliant again in the spring. It happens whether I like it or not. It happens.
Letting go brings such grief for me. And this grief is my bell.
This month I am embracing the lesson taught to me by the trees–the trees who let their leaves go. Here are just a few things I am doing to practice this letting go:
1. I will end my guitar lessons early, not begging Jeff to stay and play just one more song for me. I will let my favorite evenings pass without holding onto the sweetness of them. I will do it consciously.
2. I am continuing on my quest to declutter the house. Every day I am making sure to find one thing I no longer use or need and will donate it.
3. I will breathe and concentrate of letting go of the breath that just brought me life. I will focus on the out breath.
4. I will bow to life as it is. When I find myself forming expectations about how I want it to go or how I think it should go I will stop and thank life for appearing just as it is.
5. I will wear a bell and every time it rings I will use it as a wake up call to detach from whatever it is that I am attached to at that moment.
What about you? What ways do you practice letting go?
