Let Go, Let Love

For a lifetime, I have had my mother to talk over the joys and pains in my world. Even with four other sisters vying for her attention, she always had an ear for me.

There was the usual and customary place at the end of the kitchen counter where I stood on a little foot stool—no matter the age—and shared my stories while she cooked dinner. A great marble table was the energetic center of the house and she held court around it for fifty years, listening with heart and doling out wisdom I rarely had reason to question.

When I lived on the other coast, the phone line became a lifeline as I described the little steps of her grandchildren and the bigger strides that led to the dissolution of a marriage. In her final years of awareness, I called her daily from a cell phone to remind her of the roads, towns and views of Vermont she had loved so much, until she could no longer remember how to answer the phone.

Next door neighbors in Oregon, my oldest sister Lane absorbed the role. She witnessed first hand my desperate leap into a ready-made family at the ripe age of twenty-three, when it was too scary for me to look out on the horizon of the vast open world alone. She was at my daughter’s home birth. Tom and Lane offered me shelter in Oregon and encouraged me to explore the world, open my heart and reach for the divine.

As my mother’s perception closed down, I burdened Lane more and more with binding the wounds that kept opening in the bosom of my second marriage. For twenty years, she listened to tales of my compulsive behavior to win love at any cost, driving my business to ruin to support dysfunction in the family. Despite her struggle with no perceptible progress in her little brother’s maturity, she valiantly prayed in myriad voices that I would “Let go, Let Love”, get out of my own way and ultimately accept the energy of God and Spirit so available and surrounding me.

Over the years, I have developed other lines of support, like octopus tentacles, utilizing deep friendships and total strangers to hear my stories, confirming my justifications and rationalizations. My great pal, the Doctor, has been like a brother to me and many more sisters have been added to the original four.

Two years ago, after twenty (or forty) years of being so stuck, so compulsively determined, I finally understood I had to shift my energy or die.

The relief of family and friends that my emotional tales have movement at last is immense. This burst of creative energy in song and words is joyfully celebrated, supported and encouraged. Letting go of the struggle to solve it all on my own allows for brilliant colors to be painted on horizons that are much more inviting.

Curiously, I have attracted into my life a woman who challenges me to confront so many of my old compulsions and inspires me to rise spiritually into a kind of friendship I have never known before. At my best, my stories to her are less about myself and my perceived suffering and more about our common blood, our journey of spirits trying to be soulfully human in the body.

This accident provides the opportunity for me to stop telling stories entirely…well, almost. Lane and I decided I did not need her to cross the country to be at my couch-side. The good Doctor is recovering from surgery of his own. My dear friend has had a broken car, a full work schedule, and other serendipitous events to make visits too short and sweet. For long, long, long hours in the darkness and the light, I am largely alone.

Although able and encouraged to walk across the room or out into the yard, I am mostly confined to the couch. Sharp bites in my wrist renders making music virtually impossible and every sentence written here is a labor of mind and body.

“Let go, let Love,” I repeat over and over to myself, head supported by cushions, eyes half closed looking heavenward, hands dropped and listless at my side. There is nothing for it but to let the voice grow quiet and the heart strong.

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