letting go

As Brigid approaches, I take the poetry books off the bookshelves and strew them around the house. The house altar gets its fair share, and there’s a stack of books in arm’s reach from every vantage point in the living room. On my bedside table I keep my current favorites. As Reya points out, poetry IS that place between forge and well, the exhale and the inhale, giving word to the exquisite and horrifying beauty that is life. At my office, I always have a stack of poetry books next to my chair, with Mary Oliver and Rumi being the constants. Sometimes, the best therapeutic intervention is a poem.

For the past year or so, I’ve found myself returning again and again to Mary Oliver’s Blackwater Woods. Yesterday, I returned for another visit.

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
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.

As a therapist, I’ve noted that most of my clients have trouble with at least one of the three things. Some can’t love what is mortal, some can’t hold on to it when things get rough, and some can’t let it go, even when it’s become a stone around the neck, taking them down. For me, it’s the letting go that’s been so problematic, that I’m still in process of learning.

Yesterday, I got to wondering on which of these things is the place between, if these three things relate to the breath. I think they do relate. Holding on is the inhale, letting go is the exhale, and that place between the breaths is the simple act of loving what is mortal. What a mistake to think that the letting go means no longer loving! The loving always sits there, spacious between the holding on and letting go. Here at Brigid, I’m slowing down and trying on being in that place, the pure loving, even as I let go. It’s worth a try!