On Letting Go
Letters for the Road: December 2024
Dear reader,
On the one hand, a camping trip the week before Christmas, a few days before an international move, is hardly good timing. Adventide is usually busy, sometimes frantic, with end-of-year activities and Christmas preparations. This year, with our family moving back to the U.S. on Christmas Eve, December was a blur of chaos.
On the other hand, once we arrived at our campsite, I was incapable of doing anything except resting and attending. And so I sat. In a camping chair, on an esky-turned bench, in the sand, on a rock. And I attended. To the raucous Australian birds, to the sharpness of the sunlight as it illuminated the world, warmed my skin, and cast gentle shadows of branches on the gazebo. To the wind, with its steady daytime movement of leaves and grass, and its more tumultuous nighttime pressure on our tents.
I had been impatient. I clung to those final days in Australia, and I did not easily yield my plans or their timing.
The term ‘letting go’ belies the effort required in relinquishing what we have been grasping so forcefully. To let go of what we cling to–plans, desires, fears, expectations, hopes–can require a herculean effort, the slow but deliberate and careful prying open of one finger and then another, together with the agonising sense that what we had been grasping is falling, slipping, becoming free of our control.
It takes fierce determination to calm the anxiety that arises from such a letting go. There is nothing easy or natural about it.
In Denise Levertov’s poem ‘To Live in the Mercy of God,’ she writes of the sensation of letting go, of surrendering to God. Such a surrender, she writes, ‘Becomes the steady / air you glide on, arms / stretched like the wings of flying foxes. / To hear the multiple silence / of trees, the rainy / forest depths of their listening.’
I know this feeling. I felt it during that camping trip, and I have felt it before. Yet I have rarely found that this peace comes with ease. Levertov writes that it begins with ‘Awe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of / stony wood beneath lenient / moss bed.’ And the result, that of floating, ‘upheld, / as salt water / would hold you,’ comes only ‘once you dared.’
Do I dare?
‘To Living in the Mercy of God’ by Denise Levertov
‘Ellery Creek Big Hole’ by Albert Namatjira, watercolour on paper, c. 1955.
Good Lord, you alone do all things well. I cast myself on your infinite mercy. I trust you with my all, myself, and all I love, and all I desire, my present and my future, my hopes and my fears, my time and my eternity, my joys and my sorrows. Deal with me as you know best. Keep me safe in your eternal love. Amen.
From Treasury of Devotion, 1869, revised from Prayers Ancient and Modern
On the road with you,
Laura