"To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be in no-man's land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again." Pena Chodron
When I look back on the last several months, what I see is a wave of letting go experiences that have been dark, sad, and superbly revealing -- and then fresh and new as I move through time. Back in March, which now feels like a long time ago, I let go of my memoir in its second draft form, sending it off to be scrutinized and evaluated by my smart young writing teacher. The days before I packed it up in the manila envelope and went to the post office, I was consumed with nervous angst, with each page shrieking at me and saying, "listen, listen now! ... you must listen ... and care about my story..." And then I paid the postage and handed it over to a surly postal worker, and I went home. A few weeks later I was reading deeply from a most touching book about friendship and death, I was imagining my conversations with my grandmother as I prepared to launch her story, and I was picking up Bach's Goldberg Variations again and choosing to return to a couple of old favorites therein. Slowly but surely my fingers felt the muscle memory return and became warmer, and pretty soon I was playing those stunning ornaments and counterpoints with conviction, and smiling like crazy at the wonder of it.
I let go of my hospice job that had been the cornerstone of my life these last ten years because I could not navigate a conflicted relationship, and because I felt I was being rejected and it hurt like hell. I backed away to sort out the emotional confusion, and soon went on a journey to Italy, my ancient home, where I walked the cobbled streets with all my senses purring away, and looked at art and felt once again re-born. Gazing at beauty will do that to me. I makes me want to flap my wings and fly again. And as I explored, I remembered the residents at the Victorian guest house in San Francisco and sent them compassion from afar. I was still doing the work in a way, though my body wasn't moving through their physical landscape.
I let go of trying to find an old, old love in my life when my messages of curiosity to him went unanswered. Oh well, I thought, perhaps I have the wrong person, or perhaps the right person and the wrong time, or perhaps right person and just not quite the right time. With more than fifty years since we had been close there was a vast landscape of not knowing. And simply my wish to understand and recreate the connection will not make it so... And then early one morning after I returned from my Italian adventure, I saw a message written in Italian on my cell phone, a message from this seventy-six year old Sicilian gentleman who had loved me long ago. I detected surprise and curiosity in his tone, I could almost see a smile spreading on his face, and I felt a flutter in my heart that morning. I brushed off my vocabulary a bit and responded. Something new was born. And I have no idea where it will go or what it means!
It turns out that being thrown from the nest of creature comforts and imagining we know what's going on is a good thing. It forces us to be momentarily invisible, and then finally dust ourselves off and start again. From invisibility and "don't know mind" we take on new form, sing a new song, dance a new dance... That book I brought kicking and screaming into the world will assume its own place out there, not as an intimate part of Mag, but simply as something I made. And my mindful caregiving work will assume a cleaner, clearer, more heart-full character as it reforms itself, and finally the old romantic chapter will be re-written in some mysterious way, according to the laws of causes and conditions and not necessarily in keeping with my shimmering dreams and visions. And the beauty of it is that while we will surely stumble and fall, we never seem to forget to fly!
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