To Let It Go, To Let It Go

There are moments when I'm with my son, on a playground, holding him in my lap, snuggling him in his sleep, when I see him and my heart spins, completely taken over by love. Today, the moment happened as he mounted the bright orange stairway of the playground, holding onto the yellow railing, climbing higher and higher above my head, into the blue sky. For a second, his little body blocked the sun just as I looked up at him, and the glow around his body flooded me with that full-soul love.

It's in moments like these that I imagine all the other mothers and fathers in the world, and how they must experience these moments, too. So much love, so much light. It seems like the earth would get knocked off its axis with this much love flowing out into the world.

When he was first born, in that rush of hormones and new love, I would wake up in the middle of the night and realize that one day, he was going to grow up, and I was going to have to let him go into his own life. (Two new parents recently joked that they were planning to "homecollege" their daughter. We all laughed because it feels so true, especially in the sweet new days of a baby's life.)

Maybe it was a bit much, to pre-live that distant transition when my son was barely two weeks old. But maybe it wasn't.

I felt the same breaking open when I read this poem. From Mary Oliver, of course, high priestess of nature and poetry. Speaker of spirit, spinner of breath.

Read it as a prayer.

"In Blackwater Woods" by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
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.

Comments

[Suzi Banks Baum]

Oh Jennifer. First Huff Post and now this.
Thank you.
For taking the time.
To write.

Yours, S