Letting Go - Fall 2005

In her exquisite poem “In Blackwater Woods,” poet Mary Oliver writes the following:

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal,
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

I cried the first time I heard this poem. I was thinking about my mother who had passed away some years before--a woman who was hard to hold, hard to depend upon and even harder to let go of.

At the time, I realized I was still holding fast to my longing for the mother she might have been. I still wanted what I had wanted as a child: love, attention and devotion from a woman who did not have the wherewithal to give it to me.

It would seem that what you sometimes struggle to let go of isn’t limited to what actually exists—what is mortal, in other words. What you sometimes have difficulty letting go of isn’t even real.

To love what is mortal implies, by definition, that you must love what is human, what is subject to death, limitation and flaw; that you must take your loved ones at face value, allow them to simply be, embrace their shortcomings and weaknesses along with their splendor. Hold them against your bones along with the very inevitability of their loss. This is a tall order for anybody, and an area where everyone seems to run aground now and then—the art of loving fully but without attachment or expectation. Yet, it is what you are called upon to do every single day you live in this world.

Your attachments are what make you human, and the pain that arises from the breach of those attachments is as inescapable as death itself. All your life you struggle to hold on and all your life you are consistently pulled away. No matter what transpires in between, you will come and go from this world empty-handed. That’s law.

Life stands still for no one. Everyday, without your consent or permission, fragile linch pins snap and some part of life as you knew it grinds to a halt. Whether you like it or not, you are at some journey’s end all the time. But what is so hard to grasp throughout the pain and suffering of those endings is that without the ceaseless motion of your life, the endless cycles of death and rebirth, your life would be pointless. You yourself would be dead.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the pain of letting go. It is an issue that seems to keep coming up in readings, in the lives of my friends and family, in the plight of Katrina’s survivors, and in my own life as well. We all seem to be letting go of something huge right now: a loved one, a job, our most prized possessions, a marriage, our grown children, our way of life, the things we once believed in.

I decided to take the issue of letting go on a journey. I had questions about why we always want things to remain the same, why we fear the passage of time, why we spend our whole lives struggling against the inevitability of death, and why we continue to hang on to what is dead and gone instead of reaching for the living and present.

The answers came something like this:

Let’s think of life as a garden. Your garden looks beautiful and you say to yourself, I wish it would stay this way forever. Then I wouldn’t have to work so hard to tend it. But if that were really possible, your garden would instantly become static and dead—a thing of artifice. It would no longer be growing and vital—the very qualities which make it so beautiful to you in the first place.

Life asks you to participate with it, to meet it life to life, to take your own livingness and add it to the collective process. Think about what a gardener does for a garden: he pulls away weeds, trims, prunes, protects, fertilizes. A gardener encourages growth, but he doesn’t control it. He doesn’t make things grow—he gives them the opportunity to. This is the best way to approach your own life. You can create a garden, till it, shape it and keep away weeds and pests, but the fruition of your labors is not up to you—it’s up to life.

A wise gardener does not put a time limit on the growth of his plantings. He does not stand with a stop watch and a tapping foot impatiently looking for shoots to appear. He knows that if he has done everything right, they will appear quite miraculously—like clockwork—on their own. You lack such a faith in your own life process.

But what if you thought of your dreams as seeds? You have dreams, but you keep them in your pocket instead of inside a soil where they might grow. Your excuse? I’m afraid to plant these seeds—I’m afraid they will die or blow away or get eaten. But keeping dreams inside your pockets does not protect them—it kills them. Instead, you rely on weeds to sustain you, the odd seed that blossoms into some paltry nourishment. And then you cry and complain that your diet is meager and uninspired.

You fail to respect timing. You want to be instantly served; you fear the very passage of time. Tic-toc, tic-toc, time is running out, you think. But the passage of time does not stop life. It will never stop life. As time marches on, everything is still becoming. It is becoming something else, and then, something else again. Even in death, you become.

This is why you are always in a state of discovery—why you cannot know everything (though you may want to), why you must coexist with the mystery of life (though it makes you uncomfortable). It is because everything is changing all the time. Life is a moving, constantly developing plot.

You neglect to care for your dreams once they find soil. You forget about them or assume they should grow without your devotion. Yes, indeed they may take root and grow in spite of your neglect, but all life craves love and devotion. Love is the fuel of life.

Begin each day then this way: I am thankful for____________________. Here list all the things you desire to have happen in your life. In saying I am thankful for, you are setting the intention and acknowledging that you have the power and birthright to create your own life without fear.

Let go of limitation. Never say can’t.

Breathe in your life with joy. In, out, in, out. This is the movement of life. Bring experience in, hold it, learn it, feel it nourish you. Then, let it go.

At day’s end, say this: I am thankful for __________________. Here list everything that has transpired. Everything. It may not be apparent to you why something that feels so lousy is a blessing. But you must assume it is. You must enforce your belief in the goodness and wisdom of life.

Once you have expressed your thanks for what has passed, let it go. It is done.

These past few weeks, I have tried to keep to this formula of daily living. I like the feeling that it gives me—that I am living my life consciously and conscientiously. That I am tending my own garden, so to speak. It has made me feel more in control of my life even though I exercise less control over the process—going with the flow instead of swimming upstream.

When you do these exercises day after day, everything kind of opens up. Experience starts rushing in and sometimes it’s hard to keep up. Feelings—like some prior sadness or disappointment—have the freedom to bubble up to the surface. Admittedly this isn’t always comfortable, but ultimately I have felt grateful for the chance to let go of what I had previously “stuffed”. It seems clearer to me that when painful experiences return again and again, it is because you haven’t “let go” of the emotions you invested in their history.

Keeping to this morning and evening regimen has felt like saying prayers to me. A different kind of prayer though, that does not come from a place of lack but a place of fullness and joy. And in some ways what my life feels like now is exactly that—a new place with less clutter and more light. A room with a view. I don’t feel the sharp sting of loss so much as I do the glowing anticipation of what is yet to be held and beheld.

“To be able to live in this world” becomes not so much a challenge or a skill, but a gift and a privilege.

My message to all of you is to embrace everything that comes into your life. Receive it as a gift (even if it feels more like a curse). And when the time comes to let it go, let it go.

Peace to you all,

Jane