forgiveness

stay.

Image blue solsticeLeave a comment

The things we want to stay, wish to stay, hope to stay the same, are the very things impossible to keep. Someone else’s attention, fleeting and fierce, wanes in the natural course of their next thing. Pointing in a new direction for them feels like a loss of direction for us. Unknown and unkept, the movement into their next thing opens up our attention to something else, the familiar turn of life ever receding and bringing in newness from the tide of change. The sea glass worn by time and sand, it’s novelty beautiful and clear.

‘Let it go’ can be a trite saying, a prescription to feel better, said over and over to someone suffering from something lost. How can we let go of what we never had? The releasing isn’t of the thing we wished for, it’s letting go of the wish itself. The longing for better days, riding in on what we believe someone else holds for us. Letting go of what we think they hold, that’s the open handed prayer, the supplication and forgiveness rolled into one tumbled stone of tide sanded clarity.

Taking back your power from someone else isn’t exactly what it is, it is more taking back your part of the agreement you made to wait for them. No one else really takes your power, but at times your waiting does feel powerless. Removing them as the author of that feeling is the first kind truth.

Your power never left, it is the thing that stayed and stays. The power to begin again and again, thats the story waiting to be written.

note.

blue solsticeLeave a comment 
The last note of the song I sing you will be love. 

Never mind the other notes, the high and sharp ones, the instruments tuning their swelling  chaos, the flat tones lost in the rush to be complete, finished. Never mind the dropped sheets of well crafted verses of all the ways I wished it would have ended. 

I know you won’t be coming in on the chorus, to sing a soul filled harmony on the  bridge we left our locks on. I know this, and yet…

It doesn’t seem to matter now that the strings missed their cue, and the horns stood silent when the point was made, leaving the stage frighted lyrics alone in that echoing hall. It matters what is still there, singing. 

You won’t ever hear this song. 

And still—I hope in all the thrumming of the universal orchestra there will be this one last low note, achingly sweet and longer than most, and one day, maybe faraway and distant, you turn your head a certain way and listen. 

Maybe then, in that far off then, you will know, the last, most important note of the song I have sung for you was love. And maybe then you will know it was for you.

gone.

blue solsticeLeave a comment

I have learned a few things lately, some lived, some lost, some dreamed. I have learned that I love wholeheartedly who is in front of me, and am just now learning that those behind me lighten that love, instead of darkening it.

The ones behind, those I have lost, through the turns of the earth and its unending evolution to other worlds, those slipping their bodies to find white-lit horizons, showing up in other ways, in nightly multi-colored plays while I sleep.

Those who have left in this life, their story of me exploding into so many blossoming words, showing up in other ways, in their absence, the memory of us laughing.

Those very things behind me fuel love, and now that I know this, the love unleashed in front of me is purer; unbridled, and free.

I dreamed last night, sitting across from a broken heart, her words telling me my pain allows her to not feel better, not quite yet. What is hurting is coming toward her, and she says the grittiness of the things I have mourned allows her the grace to wait to feel better, the expectation that we won’t find the silver lining, that she can be wounded, healed and released all in her good time, not mine, not ours.

I often dream what I don’t yet know how to do, the lesson taught by wise hands that no longer hold me here, in this world. I wish I knew who taught me, I have asked to know, and only feel quiet.

I have lived so many years in the belly of the beast of ‘feeling better’, and now I know, the not feeling better is a gift to those in front of me, those who I love wholeheartedly, while those behind me leave their trail of soft goodbyes or sand littered regrets, never knowing the flowers that will bloom from that sacred, holy place.

too heavy to carry.

blue solsticeLeave a comment

It wasn’t that I couldn’t hold it. It was that I couldn’t carry it. I could hold it static, talk myself into the value of its weight. But to take a step and then another. I could not find the strength to do that.

So I thought it was just the latest thing. Whatever it was that I was holding most recently. It’s just that I can’t hold that one thing. So I would put it down and try again. Something else would be easier.

Something else was never easier. Over and over I tried. And still I couldn’t take that first step. I couldn’t hold the weight of it, any of the many its , and putting them down, one after another meant I couldn’t turn and go back, the path littered with the failure to move, burdened.

The way around them began to be words, words could fit in between and around the unforgiving stones left behind.

The words became letters, the letters became honest. I’m sorry, those letters spelled. I didn’t know how to stay, how to love, unguarded. How to leave gracefully.

I’m sorry for believing I needed to.

This path to wholeness was part living it, and part writing about it. As the words become lines and paragraphs and posts I am learning what it meant. A timeless non consecutive wandering, a road, winding and long and lined with younger versions of me waiting to speak. It is simple and honorable to write what they say.

the book of forgiveness.

blue solsticeLeave a comment

‘Like all explorers we are drawn to discover what’s waiting out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it’

Pema Chodron

There are quotes on each page of the journals I kept, words to guide the way to somewhere I believed others had found. The elusive graceful space of calm and light.

On each page, a place I had lived, and the journal prompts to capture my days there. And that one hidden place of what I didn’t want to write. It seemed clear in the pattern that emerged that it wasn’t what I didn’t want to write about, it was who I didn’t want to write about. Each page, each place, a name. Someone I had talked into forgetting, a person who lost their personhood in my casting of them into the stone of their worst self.

I wrote the names down. And started another, smaller grey moleskin journal, to write the first letter that I didn’t want to keep. I still have that meant to be burned journal. Because the first letter I wrote wasn’t to the first person who I needed to write to. It was to the one that hurt the most. The most recent.

From the first page of that smaller journal: As I journal the places I have lived, the things I loved to do, books, movies, food—there are things I don’t want to write about. People I don’t want to give any space to—as if pushing them out of the experience erases something. My intention with this forgiveness is to release those dark areas that are stuck where I’ve left them. I’m going to start with the one I need to forgive the most…it’s time to go back and let go, once and for all, release them, release myself.

I knew that traveling back to the first place I lived couldn’t be done behind the ice of the last person I blamed. At the end of the letter I wrote her were these words, ‘I forgive you and I hope you forgive me too. I love you—I still do.’

I didn’t burn that letter. But even so the fire of the truth of it melted the cold enough for me to keep going.