The Deep, Delicate Dance of Letting Go

Just when I think there is no one there, I am catapulted into a dance, or perhaps it is a trance…  of kindness, connection, and quietude.

A text message, an email, or in my case a WhatsApp Chat, arrives on a chime… and a smile lights up my face. There is proof that I am not forgotten. I was just a bit lost for the last hour or so.

Or…  I forgot to become still… to go within… to clutch my phone so I can listen to an Audible book that brings me home to myself because the author’s voice reading her book touches my soul so deeply.

So much to do is an old habit of mine, yet I have entered into this phase of my life in order to learn to slow down.

My practice is to stop doing…

Do you? Have a practice like this?

I stretch my computer-aching body and remember to squeeze my PC muscles. I lay down on the floor or the bed in a sincere attempt to feel better. “Take five,” I hear within. “This tension you are feeling really has nothing to do with you.” Perhaps this is true.

I read deep and moving email newsletters, often from women I know… the kind we, and they, call “Blogs,” but I want a better name for them… outpourings or becomings or meanderings… those all work for my sensitivity more than blogs! And I am touched, often beyond words, by these outpourings … as they invite intimacy. They invite me to see, feel, hear, know, what another is feeling, seeing, hearing, knowing. That makes my day; or my night, as my nocturnal meanderings find me once again looking into my screen for connection and creativity.

I received a text message from a woman my massage healer therapist told about me. She now comes to my apartment for  sessions where we instantly hold hands and dive deep into truths we are seeking or knowing as tears well up in a recognition of one another.  Women have a genuine hunger for connection. We cannot fake that we don’t. In those moments the soul drinks deeply of this medicine. The sacred comes at unexpected moments in unexpected ways.

Have you noticed that?

Women, like me, have a variety of activities to turn to when the computer jams or the planned moments are delayed or simply when I have had enough of “getting things done.” One of my distractions is to go to my closet, pull out a few things that I have loved but continue to ignore and lay my creative Shakti on them to discover… can they work or should I give them away?

Sadly, they worked 5-to-10 pounds ago but miracles happen, don’t they? I don’t need to go shopping! Thank Goddess for distraction as well as a positive attitude. I have learned to keep the things that are unique and discard the mundane.  Every closet clean-out in my life could join with the grocery lists I have written as proof that I am alive and living a fruitful life.

I confess to being continually fascinated by the ability of women to connect… to connect as though they had been told at birth that their moment would come and they would fall into one another like a fish taking to water.

“I feel like I have known you forever,” we say. “Here is my grandmother’s gold and ruby wedding ring… why don’t you wear it for awhile?”

That actually happened to me some years ago when a long lost sister and I knew we had found one another again. She slipped that ring upon my finger, and in some obscure way, we were married for a time. No, this was not a sexual or gay relationship, but a recurrence and a remembrance of an ancient friendship. I eventually gave back her family heirloom simply because it was time. It was a similar moment a year or so ago when I gave my gold and diamond wedding band that I had worn in sacred marriage with myself to a dear woman friend. I loved her enough to seal our bond in this way. I never regretted that moment. “Keep it.” I whispered, “It’s yours!” My bond with myself was that strong. I didn’t need to wear that ring anymore.

Speaking of Grandmothers … one of my favorite fables is the story of my sister-lover-girlfriend who got to sleep naked with her grandmother when she was five! To this day at nearly sixty, she remembers those times with misty eyes. I listen with my own misty eyes, wishing my grandmother hadn’t been so… Victorian… but she was. 

What followed that was my memory of sleeping naked with my grandFATHER when I was five.  Mainly what I remember in the little twin bed with my large grandfather was the sounds of the crickets through the open window all night long. Sweet… nothing threatening… just very sweet.

What a blessing that we were not ALL molested by an uncle or a grandpa! There is so much talk of all that on Medium and everywhere…  I am, quite honestly, amazed that these stories of hidden violations are ready to come out of the closets of millions of women, not unlike the clothes that no longer fit.

BE the Love that you are, Caroline