Perhaps it is the particular task of getting old to learn to let go. We learn to let go of our childhood, our plans for the future, our careers, our children, perhaps our partners and many friends.
Finally, we learn to let go of ourselves. To face that eventuality that the individual self that I am will no longer be.
I began to accept this when I realized that I don’t miss any of my former selves – that me that was a baby or a child or a teenager. Or even the me that existed five years ago. And so the loss of my current self no longer seems so unbearable.
I do hope that somehow I will become part of the great cosmic mystery we live in. I certainly hope I don’t find myself in some kind of static, non-changing, ”perfect” place with nothing to do but sit around.
When my sister was visiting here last month, we were walking in the fields and found a feather. Her thoughts, too, are about learning to let go.
Way Of The Single Feather
Last night’s mockery of Orwellian shamanism
Still twitched at the corners of my mouth
When I happened upon (never mind that there were several)
Sun stroked remains bearing witness to a pheasant’s sky circles
Brought to a
Dead
Stop.
What meaning might be brought to this synchronous memento of living flight?
There is at first the courage born of facing loss,
and then the dusty futility of objectifying breath
as if, by drying a flower, or mounting the hunted, or refusing to exhale
we might hold sway over the letting go.
Still, a legacy will not be denied this lone feather.
An afterlife, beyond its evolutionary process has begun.
Let it be the pen through which these words flow
An on-going eulogy to a life of sky circles
Marking the pages of my mind’s meanderings.
It will never fly again. No.
Yet its unconscious beauty allows a sense of awe in my life.
Perhaps I too am a mere part
That the very term realization is a feint.
Is the bird itself a feather?
I will take the way of this single feather as my way for a time.
Perhaps I will learn something.
Perhaps I will remember that I too once flew in great sky circles
And that I can no longer is not my failure
But simply my new normal.
And when the mere shadow of my former self
Loses sight in the darkness of its own passing
I will most certainly contemplate
the way this lone feather came into its incredible shamanic power
and laugh my way to the light again.
