Practice
The art of loving and letting go. And a message about The Art of Freedom.
Dear readers,
A week ago, I struggled to complete this short piece. Something wasn’t quite right, and my Sunday deadline was looming. I found myself feeling squeezed by a sense of obligation, and I thought, Huh.
How do I write about letting go, when I’m holding on so tightly to deadlines and duty?
And if I equate letting go with freedom — which I do — how can I feel more free as I continue to publish The Art of Freedom?
Then I read’s latest marvelous piece, which helped me round out this piece on letting go, and I was able to finish it. It’s below: a coda of sorts to Immortality I and Immortality II, published earlier this month.
But I’m still pondering those questions I posed above.
In order to answer them, and in the spirit of freedom and letting go, I’ve decided to take a break from my regular publishing schedule, to feel my way into what direction The Art of Freedom is going to take in the new year.
I’m not sure how long this hiatus will take, but if it stretches beyond a few weeks, I’ll freeze all the paid subscriptions and reinstate them when I pick back up.
If you have any thoughts on content or ideas for me, please let me know in the comments. I really do want to know what moves you about this Substack. Why do you read it? Would you tune in to interviews if I started a podcast? What would you like to see more of? Less of?
In the meantime, please know that I am beyond grateful for your presence here. I feel so lucky to be walking this wild, wondrous path with you.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. I wish you all blessings of peace during this holiday season, and may your hearts be light.
xox
M
I’m in training.
You see, all my life, I’ve been practicing letting go.
I started with the easy stuff— my mother’s hand so I could walk on my own, a doll I never liked, some teeth.
I moved on to a half-filled scrapbook, some cut-rate trophies, notes I passed in high school that were funny at the time.
It got harder: letters penned from friends (when people wrote those things), ideas for poems stuffed in a jar, a birthday card from my mom.
Then, just before I turned 24, I had to let go of her, too.
That was the hardest by far. A crash course in letting go. It took years.
I got married and had children, both of which gave me endless opportunities to practice letting go. They still do.
Gone is the unlined skin of my youth, a desire to be famous, the need to be right.
I let go of the earnest crayon drawings that graced our fridge for years, tucking my children in at night, their hands so they could walk on their own.
The wish my kids could have known my mother — that went, too.
Houses with walls I lovingly painted, careers I thought were perfect for me, towns I thought would be my forever home.
Some best friends.
Party affiliations, some (but not all) forms of perfection, pedestals, over-apologizing— gone.
Most recently, religion and certainty bit the dust.
Practice, practice, and more practice.
The truth is, everything is crashing down around us all the time, so I might as well embrace it. Past becomes present in every instant; change is the only constant.
When a cat plummets from the high branch of a tree, or off a balcony, she is showing us her mastery of the art of letting go. In that moment of free-fall, she relaxes into pure faith. She is the embodiment of nonchalance, of trust.
No thought is involved. Faith is her instinct, and instinct is her faith.
It is that faith that revolves her in mid-air, faith that spins her limbs earthward, faith that delivers her paws to the ground, unhurt.
She moves from one reality to the next, effortlessly.
I want to be like that cat. I want to be so adept, so faith-full, that one day, when it’s my turn, I’ll relax into the drop, slipping off this suit with ease to rejoin the others in the next reality.
An outbreath as simple as a smile, one beat of a butterfly wing, the sun moving out from behind the clouds.
In the meantime, I’m not there yet. Not even close.
I’ve watched others let go of a sibling, a spouse, and impossibly, a child. How would I handle that? Will I ever have to?
Let go, let go, let go, this hard-knock life on Mother Earth intones every day. She is doing her part to push us off the balcony, over and over:
the pain of watching loved ones make choices we wouldn’t make;
the anger that rises up in our throats at narcissistic power-tripping oligarchs and greedy titans;
the grief over innocent victims of banker’s wars;
the stories we tell ourselves about all of those and more.
Just to name a few.
I’m working on bidding them all goodbye, like the dreams that come every night and slide away at dawn.
Our feline friends show us: to birth ourselves into any New World, we can’t be clinging to the Old. Relax, they say. Have faith.
Like I said, I’m in training. Care to join me?
My favourite Aaron Diaz quote:
“For reasons unexplained, every person in the world is born with a large gaping hole in the center of their chest...while not uncomfortable, it is widely considered unsightly, and pretty much everyone tries to fill it with something...some people fill it with religion, others just buy a bunch of stuff, and some even fill it with other folks...I left mine alone, though, because I found out if you run against the wind at just the right angle, it makes a whistling noise.”
Your post brings up wads of emotion in me and since you’re able to do that so effortlessly, I’d say no matter what or when you wish to write and publish something, anything, I would certainly read it and cherish it. Merry Christmas to you and yours, Mary. May your spirits be high and the laughter unabashed. ❤️
What a lovely and poignant telling of your letting go, Mary. I applaud your journey toward liberation and detailed my own journey of letting go of labels in this piece:
• https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/my-two-year-stackiversary-lattice