Saturday, January 17, 2009

Walking the Labyrinth: Part 2

I posed a question as I stood at the Labyrinth’s gate. I walked. I walked as slowly as I could, all the time seeing how my mind led my feet faster and faster, and then stepping in to consciously slow down. One foot, breathing, another foot, in and out, up and down, as slow as I could go.
In the center, what my answer was was ‘let go.’
I know about letting go. I had made a business out of helping other people clean out their attics and basements. Trying to keep my own stacks of papers and books, and closets relatively free of unusable things was on my mind many times.
Let go.
“You gave your children their own lives a long time ago. You’ve given them space to make their own choices, no matter what that looked like. Now is another layer of that,” I heard.
It was shown to me how people can make choices to go or stay and it’s not about me or what I think should/could happen.
Watching your children choose between possible life and death, you have to just hold the space and love them through it…I can do it. I’m not kidding myself about how hard that might be. I have no idea of the way my emotional body may have to stretch and reshape itself as my physical body had to do when they each were born.
I left the center of the Labyrinth, walking slowly through the convoluted curves and turns. I thought of what I wanted to write when I returned to my notebook. Then I realized I needed to let go of that as well. If I remembered anything from this walk today, it would be whatever I needed to note, so I could continue to think about it.
I re-gave my children whatever choices they might make back to Mary, an image of the Divine Mother. My children, I’ve known, were only mine for a time, and then I have to let them go back to where they came from.
I’ve let go of their lives so many times, I thought as I walked the white on blue lines on the floor, noticing the cracks in the concrete under my feet. I thought those cracks represented my resolve. And maybe there were cracks in my resolve, and I would have to come back to this place in myself many times to really let go.
Let go. Putting these thoughts and feelings on paper, I let them go with the ink to bleed into the page and let them go.
Jyoti

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