If I Don't Let Go, I'll Never Really Know

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.

I Dreamed God Was A Woman

Last night as I was praying
Laying wrought
Weaving around myself a spell
Creating space,
Drinking grief from the holy well
Warp and weft on my loom
Building my own little womb
Where I can finish becoming.
Let me be safe
so I can do the work I came to do,
I felt my guides and ancestors and allies
and still I felt my fear rise, in my gut
so I went farther back, higher up,
and asked for God to make himself known,
to remind me I am loved and have a home
beyond this place where work is hard
where joy is calling to be shown.
I finally drifted off to sleep and dreamed that God was a woman,
and thought, No, that can’t be,
God a woman?
So I checked again, and yes, eternal feminine energy.
With a lap big enough for you and you and me
to all to crawl into and Oh, I thought,
all of the men will be so mad
if I say this out loud, and I’ll be caught.
And backed into a corner to plead and explain
to reassure them that it doesn’t mean
that God is not
a man
and how, I thought,
can I make sure
I don’t call forth the God of wrath
that none are banished or removed
and it has nothing to do with any of that
but only with the love that is behind us all,
inside us all on our behalf.
Afraid of what a man would say
about a dream of mine and what do I know anyway,
I thought and thought until I forgot
that I dreamed God was a woman.
And in the morning light
because I spent so much time last night
trying to fight
against the ones who will say that I am wrong
I am too tired to explain that I know, I know
God is both and more, an eternal song.
But last night She came to me
And I can assure you we
are in her lap,
safe and warm and loved and home.

Joy&Grief

I really had no idea how closely joy and grief are linked together. I thought of them on opposite ends of some spectrum, grief so far down at that end that I never really get all the way there, and joy so far over on the other side that I never really get there either. I mean, I’ve visited the neighborhoods. I know sorrow. I know happy. I know fun and meaning and nostalgia and excitement and gratitude. But I’ve never really, really, visited grief, and I’ve never really, really, visited joy. And I certainly didn’t think they were intimate entwined lovers.

It’s so odd that here in 2021 after what we’ve all been through, the loudest calling in my life is for joy. It’s unexpected. It seems out of place. I keep checking in, looking around me, going, ‘Really? Now?” Now that I’ve gotten so good at slipping and sliding around in the underworld trying to make sense of my suffering and the suffering of the planet, now that I know that journey back and forth and sideways and now that I can bear it, survive it, face it, transmute it even, now all of a sudden comes the time for joy? How strange.

But yes, there it is, unmistakable, in the tremble of the leaves on the tree in my little back patio (‘joy’, they whisper) and there it is again in that blue sky so clean and deep that it hurts your eyes to fully see it (‘joy’, it shines). The little dusty red house finches that come to my feeder each morning screech joy! and the tiny seedlings pushing through the soil in the flats in my living room stretch joy! and the tarot cards I pull slap joy and the people I talk to speak joy and most surprising of all, my heart, pounding away, thudding joy joy joy joy.

So I head off in that direction, looking for where joy lives, and I find that it’s right next to love. That makes sense, sure, but then unexpectedly I find right next to love and joy, grief, and that shocks me, but also makes me feel a little better about the whole thing because it gives it an authenticity that I was afraid it wouldn’t have. I don’t want saccharin sticky ooey gooey simulacrum joy. I don’t want clean, convenient, bearable joy. I want joy to break me open like my own agony broke me open (what a gift). I want my joy made of mud that I pull up from the earth to smear on my face and thighs and joy that pulls my head back to howl with laughter and some other wild thing that is as ineffable as the grief and love it hangs out with.

Of course it makes sense, though, that joy and grief and love are all together. Grief is love. What would there be to grieve if it wasn’t? Grief exists inside of and because of love. And loving big enough and hopeful enough and courageous enough begets joy.

I think. This is a new journey for me, and like every new journey, I can’t even see the path, much less where it leads and how to get there. I don’t know the rules yet, or what I will learn along the way, but I know that it will be all wrapped up in love. Hope. Courage. Grief. Resilience, and again.

Love. Hope. Courage. Grief. Resilience. And Joy. Who knew?