Hold On to Letting Go

A close encounter of the absurd kind

Yellow early light
throws shapes across the bed,
and I, sitting up,
beleaguered by my life,
try to meditate.

Knees bent beneath the quilt,
forearms resting on my knees,
one parched eye reaches out into the garden
to feel the light
and then the breeze,
and then I drift.

I drift into a different space,
a melting space.
I’m out in space.

A vast cosmos hurtles by,

stars sparking off my shoulders,
bouncing off my thighs,
my body angled in the same degrees
as I was back in the bed.

I’m rattled,
being rattled,
and not at all content.

From the cosmic clouded hue,
something huge,
a warrior in blue,
skin marked with tribal ink.

Huge hands grab me by the elbows
and a tender, powerful voice
bellows through my bones:

“Hold on,” he says.
“Hold on.
Hold on.”

Wisdom enters into my heart.
I grip him in return
and repeat his words to him:

“Hold on.
Hold on.”

But then, with deep furrowed brow,
an old command takes grip.
“No, that’s not right,” I say,
my head still bowed.

“Everybody has been telling me
for the last two years and more
that I should be letting go,
that I need to let go,
that I need to let go.”

“Yes,” he says.
“That’s right.”

With wit and glint,

“Hold on to letting go.”

One final elbow squeeze.

“Hold on to letting go.”

There was something of my late brother Ciarán in the reply. The wit of it.

That slight smart-aleck return, answering my objection with the same words I’d offered him. I had interrupted a vast blue warrior out in the wild cosmos to point out a contradiction in his advice. He, it seemed, was entirely unbothered by the correction.

Since that encounter, I have wondered whether it was Shiva, or my brother, or some other figure arriving from a depth of myself I rarely get to meet.

It happened in that early morning borderland between waking and sleep, the bedroom still somehow present in the angle of my body, the quilt beneath my knees, the thin light on my face. I can't say for sure who he was. What I recognised though was the humour. And the tenderness had weight to it. Hands around my elbows. A voice travelling through my bones.

For years, people had been telling me to let go. I had been telling myself. Remarkably easy advice to give. But what am I letting go of, exactly? The grief? The person? My wish that something might have happened differently? And how does one do it? There is no little catch beneath the ribs. No obvious place to put the thing once you have finally agreed to stop carrying it.

I can turn almost anything into a task. Even surrender. Give me an instruction to let go and I will set about it with sufficient determination to ensure that nothing moves. I will check my progress. Discover that I am still attached. Become attached to the problem of my attachment. Another thing to get right. Another occasion for the furrowed brow.

Perhaps that was where the joke found me. Ciarán knew the danger of my furrowed brow. He would have let me make my case, then handed it back to me, lightly, as if to say: there you are again, making a ceremony of it.

Hold on to letting go. I keep returning to how he tightened his grip as he said it. The words sound like a contradiction only if holding on and letting go are opposites. In the experience itself, they were not. Being held was what made release possible. I could feel his strength in my arms, the warmth of his hands, the solid pressure travelling into my joints. I could grip him back. Whatever surrender meant in that moment, it did not mean falling away alone. It meant loosening my hold while remaining held.

I don’t want to analyse this encounter until there’s nothing left of it but a near vapid instruction. There were stars bouncing off my thighs, light flashing across my skin, and the ridiculousness of trying to discern which advice I was supposed to follow while I hurtled through space. And then that wit I loved and dearly miss.

I can still feel the squeeze at my elbow.

And I still love the absurdity.