Dear Friends,
I started writing this a couple of weeks ago, and as I have moved through these days, I find that it is part 1 of two parts. Today I’m thinking about what it means to love what is mortal, and the poignancy and beauty of that love. I’m also thinking about how I can steal my own joy by anticipating the future letting go, rather than resting in the love here and now. Tomorrow, I’ll share part 2 about an experience of pure joy.
To live in this world you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
I have returned to these lines from the poem “In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver so many times over the years and I have even written about this poem before. Always I have focused on the third thing––the letting go, on that time out there in the future when all of us will have to let go of something or someone that we love. But lately I have been pondering the first thing.
What if the first thing is actually the thing? To love what is mortal.
To love when you know you will have to let go.
To open yourself up to loving what is mortal and maybe even mortality itself.
It feels overwhelming, like I can’t breathe, when I focus on the loving, because that part is right now, not somewhere in the future. And the depth of loving connections that I feel makes the prospect of letting go unbearable.
Maybe they all happen at once, the awareness of the love, the holding it even against your bones, and the knowing that we will have to let it go. Maybe it is this trifecta that makes it hard to breathe.
But that is precisely what we are here for. That is what makes this life so very beautiful. It is the fact that we will have to let go that makes the loving and holding so precious.
Facing mortality makes the prospect of letting go so very concrete. I don’t like this part.
I spin out into dread of the letting go. Not even the ultimate letting go, but an ordinary one.
While driving to Oregon last month to visit my daughter and her partner one last time before they move, I felt the weight of their coming move 2,000 miles away to a city where they will live for at least 8 years of school. I was melancholic and rehearsing the mourning as we drove. This is what I do. It is not helpful.
I wind it back in, the line I have cast into the future, and I stand in the present. We are all here together, right here, right now. I can choose to be all in. I can choose to stay right here in the present and savor every little bit. I forget about the leaving and enjoy the now, allowing joy to wash over me.
It is a lesson I have to learn over and over it seems. I think this is the holding it close to your bones part.
The loving of what is mortal, the holding it close to your bones can only be done in this moment, right here, right now. It’s not the future letting go that needs my attention today, it is the loving who and what is right in front of me.
The only thing that will prepare me, prepare any of us for the letting go is the loving and the holding.
Come back tomorrow for an appreciation of the joy that comes when we stay right in the moment of love.
Thanks for being here. Please share this with folks who would be interested.
To Love,
Maija
P.S. Andrea Gibson had such a profound conversation on this episode of the We Can Do Hard Things podcast on what it means to live with a wide-open heart, even in the face of illness, and what it means to develop a loving relationship with our mortality, and how hard and beautiful this all is. I can’t recommend this conversation highly enough. It is hard and beautiful, just like the best lives.
Song of the week: May I Suggest, sung here by Red Molly.
OMG… I have become a Maija Beattie groupie here… I have read and listened to this twice now as well as the interview with Andrea Gibson. It’s all such a treasured gift. When she talks about death and being here “more” … YES it’s true. And then the whole thing about the greatest art coming from those on the other side of this worldly threshold… YES.
And the right here, right now, that you are experiencing… YES, YES, YES!!! Your presence is unfolding and expanding and I am so grateful to you! THANK YOU❤️💜❤️💜
Well…wow. There is so much here. It’s so simple and yet, I will have to read this over and over again. Thank you sweet Majia. 🤗