what can you trust?

on letting go

Hi sweet humans. How are you doing these days?

All month I’ve been starting and stopping and editing and re-drafting various versions of the same email, and today I realized that maybe that process is revealing to me that those words need more time. So I’m letting those rest and sharing this smaller, lighter post today.

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This morning I pulled a card from the questions deck I made a couple of years ago, and it asked me: What are you letting go?

People who know me know I love asking questions. They’re probably one of the first nonbinary approaches I learned about, before I realized I was nonbinary or that approaching the world in nonbinary ways was something that I could write or talk about. I love questions because of their capacity to take you unexpected places, how they return and recur, and how frustrating it can be to have an unanswered question press in on you, pop up in the night and keep you up for an hour, wash you in panic in the middle of lunch at your desk, on and on.

Some of you have heard this story before from me, but/and here’s what I remembered thinking about letting go:

I used to think that letting go was an active process — something you paid attention to, that you had to be aware of for it to happen, that if you took your eyes off it, the thing would linger and linger well past its appointed time.

A couple of years ago, when Mikayla and I were living by the river, I was walking in the little woods at the top of one of the hills nearby, that has some truly impressive boulders at the top of it, and where the turkey vultures would sit in the heat of the day, resting in the sun. I was walking between the rocks, under the oak trees, noticing all of the tree branches and leaves on the ground around me, and I looked up and asked the trees, how do you let things go? since they seemed well practiced in dropping their dead branches. Oh that? they replied, that’s just a thing that happens sometimes.

I was so floored by this response because it was so outside of anything I’d been thinking about. Surely letting go means you need to do a ritual or ten, visualize what is no longer for you and send it back to where it came from? If something isn’t gone yet, you must not be doing the right thing, or thinking the right things. I thought, when asking my question, there would be some clarity in the response along the lines of “now we let this one branch go at exactly the right time,” as if the tree were a factory run by extremely competent managers. But what I heard instead was that’s just a thing that happens sometimes. I thought about it really hard for a few weeks, shared it with a few beloveds in a kind of “can you believe this shit” funny story over the next little while, and then forgot about it for about six months.

At that point we were approaching the beginning of the next summer, and one day, I was out again near the trees and I realized that thing I had been striving so hard to let go of was no longer there. It had been let go. It was, as the trees had said, a thing that had happened. I hadn’t consciously done it, hadn’t fixated on it, or found the right combination of words or visualizations. It had just fallen off, somewhere along the line.

I’m struck in some ways, writing this to you, how difficult it is to describe nonbinary approaches like this sometimes. That they involve, and perhaps require, things like forgetting, like taking a detour, like taking your eyes off whatever is bothering you and keeping you up at night and seems to have stayed well past its welcome, getting distracted for six months until you realize that the thing that has been frustrating you in its refusal to move or leave isn’t really a part of you in the same way anymore, that it has resolved itself, that you didn’t have to do a twelve point personal improvement plan in order for things to change. That letting go is perhaps a process, not completely internal or totally outside of you, but some combination of the two, or something else entirely, and that you aren’t in charge of it. That what we call letting go is perhaps something to be witnessed, or even to notice after the fact. That we can trust that even when we aren’t paying attention, it’s still happening. Maybe letting go is a way of describing a process that our bodies and the earth know how to do. Maybe letting go is a tiny piece of a much larger network of possibility.

I think I’ll pause here. All of this has me wondering, what are you letting go? and what can you trust that even when you aren’t paying attention to it, it’s still happening?

sending so much care from the trees and the creeks,

Kali