Letting Go
We live in a universe of cycles: birth and death, the seasons, dawn to dusk, and dawn again. The process of letting go is a part of these continuous cycles. It is equivalent to autumn, the falling leaves and harvesting of food.
Letting go can be hard, sometimes even painful. I live in a culture of repressed processes, the desire to toss the apple into the sand and hope it decomposes on its own. What has been forgotten in the rushing of compost, is that the process takes nourishment, nutrients, time, and care.
Letting go is found in the big and small moments of everyday life. We breathe air in, and let it out, always moving, always changing, and always coming home again. Wherever there is growth, there is also change, and letting go comes with all things change. So how do we welcome the autumns of life with open arms and open hearts?
My grandmother has blue eyes and wavy golden hair. She is beautiful, tender, warm, and fair. Tonight I sit here by candlelight, awaiting the sunrise, listening to her share stories from her life. I listen to her as I knit, dog on my lap, tears in my eyes. We are sitting in the living room of my childhood home, my father is playing the song by the Secret Sisters, Hold You Dear on the piano. Everything in my body is tender, an ocean of feeling breaking at the surface of my skin. This will be my last week in this house. It has been my place to come home to, a refuge from life’s cyclical storms. Seeds of memory are held in every stack of books, every stain on the floor, and every mark on the wall. It is autumn, and the faint scent of pumpkin pie wafts from the oven. What a perfect time of year to move on.
As things come to a close, die, and transform, illusions also begin to crumble. Our stories of a place or a relationship might not be as picture-perfect as we wish they had been. A part of letting go is the process of reckoning, allowing the illusions to crumble as the raw nakedness of life reveals itself. And so it is — perfectly imperfect, unbearable and beloved, devastating and daring, gentle and sweet.
I don’t know if I will ever master the process of release, perhaps the only masters are Birth and Death themselves, honest they are.
So speak to me of the falling of the apples, that time of year in our Los Altos house when we remembered we had forgotten to pick them. The thought of the sweetness we could have known in those moments stirs like old socks in the cauldron of regret, and yet — the earth is thirsty for the fruit she has grown. It is not a loss to be open to the moment, to allow whatever comes to come, to let whatever goes, go. I have struggled with this, for I want to taste the sweetness of every apple that has ever been grown on that bountiful tree. I want to spend every moment with every person who has ever meant anything to me. Because this life is PRECIOUS. I want to drink the nectar of every emotion and every experience. I want to lean into the rotten apple I bite so ferociously into. What would it be like to enjoy that disgusting taste? To bask deeply into the fullness of every moment, whatever it looks like. I know that this is wishful thinking. There are moments where I drawback, they are too tender and painful to want more of.
It is mid-Spring now, the rains come washing and welcoming our souls into new cycles. I open the door and walk outside. Down the gravel driveway, I trudge, in my rainboots, phone in my pocket, eyes dancing between my feet and the sky. I see the becoming of this ancient place, new hands tending old soil with the hopeful newness of creation. No mastery comes from wanting, it comes from slow doing. Every breath is a beacon of the Otherworlds, the places we were born from, the places we will pass on to. I find lessons everywhere, but they never quite seem to stick. A moment of understanding washes over me as I watch springtime blossoms manifest. “Ahah!”, I exclaim, remembering the Autumn when the leaves and the apples fell. “The apple blossoms have come again, there will be another chance to taste their sweetness”.