I woke up this morning with those words swirling.

If I don’t let go, I’ll never really know. If I don’t let go, I’ll never really know.

This season has been a deep invitation to release and surrender. There is a gentle pull on my shoulders enticing me to lean back, encouraging me to draw away from the safety of things known, beckoning me to free fall into the groundless welcoming mysterious void. I know it is Her calling me. The Goddess. The Earth. Life Herself, soundlessly rumbling through my bones. This is not the high and far call of the heavenly divine. This is not a pulling up and away, the call of the aesthete to ascend out of the mud and muck and grief of this time. This is Life, as She is, coursing through me. Rolling through my own instinctual, flesh-and-blood, animal body.

This is not a call from above to transcend. This is call from below to go within.

I resist. This is that clinging that the Buddhists are always on about. This is the fear, the holding on, the grasping and gasping I can’t do without. This is the thinking that there is an external thing, some big authority out there, that will tell me how and where to go. This is the fear of getting it wrong, the fear of death, and the longing for a directive, a policy, a plan, a big Right and Wrong in the sky, telling me what to do to make sure I’ll never die. No letting go, no little deaths, no big deaths, just the clinging frenzied panic of a lie. The lie that there is nothing that will ever die, if I just try, if I’m good enough, if I hold on hard and shut my eyes.

But behind my tight shut eyes, I see a glimmer of my future if I believe the lies. If I don’t surrender, if I don’t trust life, I will still die, a shadow shell split apart, with this unsung song in my unsung heart.

If I Don’t Let Go, I’ll Never Really Know.