"...how can I forget you... when there is always something there to remind me..."
- Naked Eyes. 1983
As I purge my home and my heart in preparation for our next wild chapter, I have been thinking a lot about the idea and the energy of "letting go". I feel like "letting go" feels hard and physical. I am resistant to it. It feels painful to donate a shirt that belonged to Darcy or to throw out an old scrap of paper with a drawing he and Summer did together, but it has to be done. It is excruciating and I feel like I'm donating the memory of him or throwing him in the garbage with every shirt and scrap I "let go" of... you feel me? I know you do. It feels like a little piece of your heart is dying with everything you let go, right? Like it's gone. And worse, like it somehow never existed.
I knew yesterday was going to be particularly hard as we said goodbye to the sweetest little vintage '63 Beetle that Darcy bought when Miller was 5, as a project for them... to renovate and go to rallies. Darcy's first car was a '63 VW too. He wanted to share that experience with his kid, and I am so glad he did. Knowing that he won't be around to actually see Miller drive a car, I feel deeply that he somehow super-consciously created this experience so that they could have some grown up memories together. My heart breaks a little, just writing that.
Miller and I have had some talks about whether the car should stay in our lives or go, and he decided to give it up for a variety of reasons... but I really wanted the energy of saying goodbye to this physical representation of love and connection to his Dad to feel lighter...and so we explored the idea of RELEASING it, as opposed to letting it go. It's different somehow. Releasing felt like freedom. Freedom from the tug-of-war that occurs in our hearts when we have to give something up. It feels more like a CHOICE...and that makes space to welcome in the memories that are imprinted in our DNA - in this case, the actual experience of seeing that car arrive at our home, taking it for it's shiny paint job and driving around with Dad. It allows us to feel the pride that Miller's heart felt when he got to bring it to Kindergarten for show-and-tell and his Dad was there to help him sit in the drivers seat and rev that little engine. These feelings LIVE in our core. They are with us always, I think.
So as the car drove away to it's new home yesterday, I tried to stay in the energy of the RELEASE. Much like death, it is only the physical piece of a much larger experience that is actually gone. We don't have to go through the painful resistance of the "letting go" if we we can just visualize a RELEASE of the physical object or body instead and acknowledge that the energy of something or someone resides within us forever. Energy doesn't go away. It moves and changes but it never disappears. That felt comforting and freeing to me.
I'm going to try to keep this close to my heart as I move through my tasks of clearing away what no longer serves me and also try to do a better job of being present in the NOW to ensure that today's memories are being imprinted and archived in my heart.
I feel like sometimes we are SO eager to capture the moments of our life in a photo...to prove it happened...to take a fleeting moment - an invisible feeling of joy - and turn it into something physical and tangible so that we can revisit it again and again... that we forget to put our phones and cameras down and just capture the moments in our cells. It may make it easier to release things and people down the road if we trust that the energy and emotions we felt about people and experiences were infinite - far more accessible, at all times, in our own hearts than in a camera we could lose or a car we had to sell...
Let's let the good parts sink in, store them in that infinite filing cabinet of our hearts and when it's time to let go...when we have no choice but to say goodbye...we can simply release.
Til Next Time,
Heal & Be Healed.
TW. xo
All photo credits to Rhonda Darch at www.rhondadentphotography.com