Letting Go
the first skill for living on the threshold
We begin all change – and growth – by letting go. The exhale that happens before each inhale. The husk of a seed that breaks open for root and shoot to grow. The grip of hand or mind that loosens long enough to make room for something new. The release of old ideas, assumptions and expectations, allowing us to notice a different promise or understanding waiting in the heart or in the wings.
Letting go can be the hardest – and most important – skill when living on the threshold. We long for something to hold onto as change sweeps certainty away, taking with it what we had depended on for steadiness before.
Personally, I am a fan of steadiness, the kind I find on solid ground. So, when the ground breaks up beneath me, I try everything I can to pull it back together.
Then, recently, I read this by poet and activist Gloria Anzaldúa, in her post 9-11 essay “Let us be the healing of the wound,” describing nepantla, the threshold space between where we’ve been and where we’re headed. She named it as a time for letting go of solid ground itself. She wrote:
Transitions are a form of crisis, an emotionally significant event or a radical change in status…. We fall into chaos, fear of the unknown, and are forced to take up the task of self-redefinition…. We undergo the anguish of changing our perspectives.
In that chaos, fear and anguish, she opened this possibility:
What we do now counts even more than the frightening event, close call, shock, violation, or loss that made cracks in our worlds. En estos tiempos of loss, fear, and confusion, the human race must delve into its cenotes (wells) of collective wisdom, both ancient and modern….
Unfamiliar with the word cenote, I looked it up. I learned from Wikipedia it is a “sinkhole, resulting from the collapse of limestone bedrock that exposes groundwater.” Typically, I think of sinkholes and collapsing bedrock as terrible and terrifying events. But the photograph that accompanied this definition looked downright paradisaical to me. Could it be — the collapse of today’s bedrock might make way for tomorrow’s wellsprings and unknown Elysian possibilities to come?
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Gloria Anzaldúa insisted that it does. That what we experience and fear as the breaking up of old bedrock, personally or collectively, can give us access to cenotes, wellsprings of wisdom that might guide us toward a new and better future.
“Ultimately, each of us has the potential to change the sentience of the world…,” she wrote. “We can transform our world by imagining it differently, dreaming it passionately via all our senses, and willing it into creation.”
Hers is not a magical wishfulness ungrounded in reality and effort. She is as clear-eyed as anyone I’ve read, even as she is unwilling to accept that the world as we know it today – broken and deeply harmed by intersecting systems of oppression – is the only world possible tomorrow.
Today, I am working on letting go of my assumption that the bedrock I have known is the only solid ground to be found. I am cracking open my old beliefs about what is possible and true, personally and collectively, to look for clear wells of wisdom that might teach me a different way.
What assumptions are you asked to let go of on the threshold(s) you are on today? And what wellsprings of beauty and refreshing wisdom, old and new, might be waiting when you do?
Here’s a poem I wrote while pondering the cracking of bedrock, the promise of cenotes, and a glimpse of wellsprings still undergound today.
There is a crack in everything There is a crack in everything... That's how the light gets in. ~Leonard Cohen I know this to be true. But must it be here? And now? Beneath my feet? I step away from sinkholes, work to patch the cracks. We use every tool and tack— cables, bridges, barriers, diplomacy and dreams, doubts and, yes, denial —we try each of these and more Seeking solid ground and desperate to recover what we thought we had before. But this we miss: A different way below, beyond repair. Where cenote becomes a well and water blue as sky peers up at us, a deeper eye with vision from another day. No longer we the seers. Now we become the seen, where light gets in and light gets out, sheered into rays shining through what we feared— This gaping crevice where tomorrow, pooled clear and fresh and cool, awaits.
Take good care, friends. If the ground beneath your feet feels unsteady, hold out your hands. There are many of us walking near you in these threshold times.*
Karen