1. Looking Back and Longing
The dead are the dead and the living the living. You are mad if you think you can change the way of the gods. Those who go to the Underworld can never return.
To retrieve his deceased wife, Eurydice, Orpheus travelled to the land of the dead. After a treacherous journey, he was finally brought before Persephone, the queen of the Underworld. Persephone agreed to let Eurydice return to Earth, but on one condition. Eurydice was to follow him up to the earth’s air and Orpheus was not to turn around at any point until she too reached the surface. Should he turn around before this, Eurydice would stay in the Underworld.
They climbed and climbed until Orpheus felt the sun’s warmth on his face. Filled with joy he turned to hold Eurydice in his arms. Eurydice wasn’t as strong as Orpheus and she was still some way behind. He looked back towards her and her face began to fade away. She fell and was lost to him forever.
It is said that mourning is only for the living but the term “rest in peace” reveals itself to have a double meaning. First, we should let the dead be dead and leave them to their fate (which they may have accepted along the way). Second, the dead should be able to take comfort in our acceptance. We shouldn’t trouble them with our misery, as Orpheus must have done to Eurydice as she fell a second time, dying a much crueler death. The first gives us our peace and the second gives them theirs. Letting go is an act of self-kindness and selflessness.
1a. Lot's Wife
Escape for your life! Do not look back behind you nor stay anywhere in the plain. Escape to the mountains, lest you be destroyed.
Lot and his wife and daughters were spared from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. They left and were instructed not to look back. “But his wife looked back behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.” It wasn’t simply that she glanced back from where they came from. Rather, she looked back longingly, she couldn’t let go of the life she had left behind and was punished for this. Her longing is what killed her. Longing devours the lives of the living.
1b. Farewells and Hauntings
"Lord, I will follow You, but let me first go and bid them farewell who are at my house."
But Jesus said to him, "No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God."
As Jesus journeyed along the road, people would ask to follow him. One man wanted to follow him but not before he buried his father. Another simply wanted to say goodbye to his family first. But the cost of discipleship is the pain of letting go.
Putting our hand on the plow means taking wholehearted, irreversible action (which is the only kind worthy of the name). To act means to transform and transformation is both death and birth. Letting go is so difficult because we are being asked to let go of ourselves.
What held these would-be followers back was a fear of being haunted. Endings terrify and taunt us. We find this in the urge to have just one more conversation, the wish to be able to say goodbye, and in the sadness that comes with the realisation that most endings dissipate, so much of what we care about feels unfinished, and that finality was a fantasy.
Regret is the price we pay for conviction, just as grief is the price we pay for love. To long for the past is death. To act halfheartedly is death disguised.
1c. Looking Back and Letting Go
When glancing becomes staring, remembering becomes longing. And although it keeps it in sight, looking back doesn’t bring the past, those people or those times any closer. Looking back isolates and fossilises the other in a way that only makes them feel far away, by placing them, once and for all, in that particular moment in time, in history. Looking back keeps the past far away because everything within it is impeded by our gaze. It can’t grow. In longing, we are lost to time and age without growing.
We typically think that it’s the dead who leave us, just as Eurydice fell away from Orpheus. But the living depart from the dead too. We fall forward into the future and. The distance between us and what was gradually grows until we’re forced to squint to keep its outline clear (what would you give to hear their laugh again?) If we want what’s dead to stay close to us, we must keep going,. so that they can come with us and grow with us too.
Letting go is making a simple choice: to leave them where they are or to let them follow us. But never to carry them, never to look for them, never to reach out to them in the hope that they’ll return.
2. Living is Letting Go
to live in this world
you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go
to let it go
Mary Oliver
When I settle upon that final line, the repetition makes me feel as though if I were to keep repeating it, I would eventually end up in silence. As if it was designed to carry us away from our hurt, as if the past disappears as the words trail off.
The instruction to “let it go” usually provokes a painful, pleading question: how can I let go when I’m not even trying to hold on? How interesting that our bodies can refuse our request, in all our desperation, to drop what we no longer want to hold.
James Baldwin wrote that we hold on to hatred in order to avoid feeling the pain behind it. This is half the story. We also hold on to things that hurt us because on some level we wish for our own destruction. The urge to wish life away quietly creeps into our bodies when we submit the future to the past.
Life is presented as a story of accumulation that moves through stages, compounds, solidifies and shines. It becomes an object for us to hold and cherish. But it is instead always a perpetual letting go, of everything we meet and earn, as and when it leaves us or whenever we’re asked to release it. It evades our grasp as it can only fall through our fingers. So that in the end, we’re not holding on to anything and are not being held on to ourselves. David Whyte describes the way we need to re-orient ourselves in his entry on heartbreak:
If heartbreak is inevitable and inescapable, it might be asking us to look for it and make friends with it, to see it as our constant and instructive companion, and perhaps, in the depth of its impact as well as in its hindsight, and even, its own reward. Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something and someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the ultimate letting go.
David Whyte, Consolations
Letting go is the other side of loving. The part that we ignore because our hearts’ command to hold on is so loud and persuasive. It is the demand of a now broken and impossible dream, to be courageous enough to trust in a world that feels so cruel.
3. Retelling the Story
We stick to the wrong thing quite often, not because it will come to fruition by further effort, but becasue we cannot let go of the way we have decided to tell the story and we become further enmeshed even by trying to make senes of what entraps us, when what is needed is a simple, clean breaking away.
David Whyte, Consolations
We struggle to let go of stories because, up until that moment, we’d lived most of the one we’d written. The story is already in action. Then, when things don’t go to plan, we can’t make sense of it — it wasn’t supposed to go this way.
Letting go is an arrival. A place you work towards through clever and troubling questioning. And instead of making violent demands of your body, to cut off something that had been indistinguishable from it for so long; gently, through subtle enquiry, the world outside will take it from you and will let you know with a terrifying but inviting calmness, “it’s over now, you can go.” Then, the story has changed.
4. Learning from the Seasons
Demeter was the goddess of harvest. She had a daughter called Persephone. Persephone was known for her beauty and many gods and heroes wanted to marry her. Demeter denied them all as no one was good enough for her daughter.
Persephone was out one-day picking flowers. The earth began to shake, noise filled the air, and out of a cloud of smoke came Hade’s chariot. He had dragged her to the underworld to become his wife.
Demeter waited for Persephone to return home. Evenings passed without her return. Despairing, Demeter went out into the night to find her. For weeks she roamed the earth, but nobody had seen her daughter. The plants began to wither and die. Winter had come.
When she finally found out what happened, she went to her brother Zeus. She threatened that no plants would grow until she got her daughter back. Worried that the people on Earth would starve, Zeus sent Hermes to Hades to ask for her return. Hades was reluctant to give her back and stated that had Persephone eaten anything whilst in the underworld, she would be his forever. Persephone admitted to eating four pomegranate seeds. Demeter promised that nothing on earth would grow again.
The rules were the rules but the earth must be nourished and people fed. Hermes had an idea. He suggested that Persephone stay in the underworld for one month every year for each seed she had eaten. They agreed to this arrangement. For eight months of the year, flowers grow and fruit ripens. For the other four, Demeter is overcome by sadness and everything dies.
It is all very well to strive in the abundant months of the spring and summer, but in winter, we witness the full glory of nature's flourishing in lean times.
Plants and animals don't fight the winter; they don't pretend it's not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that's where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.
Katherine May, Wintering
Katherine May describes a “wintering as a “fallow, period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.” Whether it’s illness, bereavement, humiliation, failure or transition, when winter arrives it’s always “involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful.” And winter always comes.
The cycle of the seasons matches the rhythm of our lives, as if they were created to teach us that nothing lasts, death and disaster come, but then, so does the spring. We are born into a world that’s made to teach us how to be human. No wonder we lose ourselves when hide from it.