Letting Go

The sun just slipped below the horizon as it left us for this day. The red and gold dancing on the waters of the Salish Sea are now giving way to steel blues, deepening greys, and will eventually rest in a blackness for several hours.   

The ancient Celts saw the day beginning at sundown so that each day begins in darkness and then awakens out of the dark shadow-filled world gradually into the resurrecting light of dawn. So with that Celtic sensibility, I let go of this day and greet a new day by finishing a few tasks and then slipping into sleep. Within sleep I will encounter my unconscious dynamics through dreams (even if I don't remember them in the morning).  There I will face emotions, thoughts, ponderings, memories, and perhaps some divinely inspired narrative designed to awaken my Self to myself. Within those dream spaces, the Spirit is loud and vivid if you tune your listening senses to that language. And following that Spirit encounter, I will move into the dawn and arise into the light of the day to attend my Life. For that cycle to do its soul-nourishing work, I must begin by letting go of this day.      

Perhaps the nurturing of relationship with the Creator of all of Life always begins by "letting go". The birth of new possibilities calls for a goodbye so that a hello can form. Our small self, the aspect of me that I think is divided from all things and is to be guarded at all costs, wants to hold on tight to that which is known, predictable, and familiar. Crossing the threshold of "letting go" is to leave sure footing by releasing those bonds and then falling into the dusk and darkness so that new imaginative material can arise. Within that imaginative space lies the next encounter that will deepen and further Life even if we are not consciously aware of that work of Spirit. Letting go begins the work over and over and over again.   

Letting go is courageous work that requires faith in the Great Mystery and a remembering that developing life is good, and right, and beautiful. Letting go often feels like anything but good. In its extreme forms it can even resemble death. But letting go is the initiation of the night that breaks into dawn and brings new possibilities with each turn of the Earth. Perhaps letting go is the most spiritual discipline of them all.     

Dr. Kirk Webb

Director of the Celtic Center