Go Lightly Child, Lightly—The Permission to Become Undone.
Just the simple fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.
Hello dear reader,
How are you this week? What is spelled out in your heart?
“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. (…)
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona (…). And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.
So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island
I have tried to be complex. To love with a kind of love that feels grand, fervent, and unapologetic. To hold many mysteries as a badge, some of which I did not know even how to begin to understand. To move through life with fierce passion, to prefer alternative art, to offer my ears to independent artists only, to curate my taste for fine food, to be outspoken and well-read, and to dress captivatingly.
All this elaborate architecture to keep me from seeing the bare truth of the soil I was made of. Leaving me lost, but never found.
Now my love is simple. It seeps slowly through and out and in and around, like honey from a hive: thick, nourishing, and sweet—but biodegradable, unimposing, self-sustaining. I can love you totally, but I can also love myself, or this pine branch I touched yesterday, daringly green amidst the greyness of half-baked winter. I kiss softly the birch’s white, scented bark to offer thanks for welcoming me day after day; in her I recognise us all.
This love holds the rest too.
My clothes are plain and mainly the colour of sand or stone. Typically no music, and if ever, it usually will be soothing, cradling, classical. I gaze up to the sky when I wish to see a painting; it is different everyday and never not heavenly. The food I eat is uncomplicated and satisfying, welcomed with reverence. Words come to serve a purpose and fade when unnecessary. And the mystery is that of living, no need to over-characterise it. Resting in observation.
I had to simplify to take root within my own soils. Now I begin to understand, at last—I never needed to look for nourishment anywhere but here.
The burden of becoming in the spaces meant for being is slowly melting away. But it makes itself known still, and that, I try my best to welcome also. With practice, I feel I am getting better at welcoming life in all its grace. Sometimes, however, when I forget to live from within, I can only offer this acceptance and forgiveness in retrospect.
Sometimes I forget, as Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer writes in her beautiful poem Inner Acreage, “the inner world is there. I start / believing only in the outer world. / How exhausting life is then. / But when I remember / to live through the gate / of intention, when I still, / it’s as if I am being breathed, / being lived. I’m out of the way. / Then everything is the way.” We will get back to this.
It does not take much to get lost. A moment of distraction, a touch of self-doubt, the thought that it might be better to be like someone else. When such a pull is allowed to linger, it can carry us away.
And it will, sometimes. It will. We cannot always press a full stop to retreat into our depths when the outside happenings demand our active participation. Naturally, there might be periods when we depart a little further from our havens and we might even get lost in the vast waters. This is a worthy part of the ever-unfolding way just the same.
A card I received from a dear friend in Portugal, now gone, which I always carry with me, reminds me of the importance of departures:
It is necessary to leave the island to see the island, for we do not see ourselves unless we step outside of ourselves.
Wandering creates spaciousness. And the lightening occurs through the abandoning of the ballast that keeps us from returning home. This is Huxley’s simple death and a clear light. Thinning out the ideas of how we should be, we can, at last, rest in the sweet love of being just as we are. Here, now, we are right were we need to be.
As I write, I am reminded of Shunryu Suzuki’s teachings:
“As long as we have some definite idea about or some hope in the future, we cannot be serious with the moment that exists right now. (…) You expect that some promising thing will come, as long as you follow a certain way. But there is no certain way that exists permanently. There is no way set up for us. Moment after moment, we have to find our own way. Some idea of perfection, or some perfect way which is set up by someone else, is not the true way for us.”
Growing confused about how we can be in this world is good news. It means we are finally finding out, at least for a while, at least for now. It will, of course, change. “There is a time for seeking and a time in which one finds,” M. used to repeat to me like a spell; my love, now as close to me as he may be close to you, unbound by the body. I took it as a guiding light, and spelled it out in my heart in the times of darkness—Huxley’s darkness that is—reassured that I am always where I am meant to be in this ever-deepening cycle.
The times of aimlessness and confusion are essential to our unraveling, for it is only they that can make, and keep us, undone deeply and long enough that we give up the urge to control and release the hold of what no longer belongs. It is not a misstep, as we tend to think, to wander off the beaten track of our own lives.
So, when a celebration is due, let us not become encumbered in the shame of being undefined. Let us step through the door of self into the uncharted lands of our beings, unossified. Let us dare to live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.
Shunryu Suzuki, once more. Here, paraphrased in my old journal entry which I wrote as a cairn to remember the way back home, possibly blending with the wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh, and tying us back to Wahtola Trommer’s words:
Trust your ways. They come from the roads you have taken in the past, and they lead you to uniquely your places. Do not try to run like others do; do not think their trails are better than yours. Just put one foot in front of the other. All that has ever existed is the step you are taking now. With each step, you arrive. There is no destination, just the way.
And a thought, revolutionary, life-opening: You cannot think the way which you are walking is wrong for you because this way is you: you and the way are one.
Everything that happens in your life is a direct reflection of the state of your mind and heart. Everything you think comes into life. If you say you are incapable, you will struggle. If you believe you are hurt, you will be in sorrow. If you think you are shy, you will resist showing your full potential. If you offer grace, you will inhabit a graceful world. If you embody love, love will meet you in each moment.
In this way, everything that you nurture in yourself, comes to life in the world. Instead of saying that others have it better or easier, instead of envying their roads, see that your road is as great as your mind and heart are. Return to them always.
If you want to love your road, you must love yourself. So give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. To love is to truly understand.
“When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.”
— Shunryu Suzuki, “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”.
In the moments when I am close to myself, when I understand myself, my path appears clear. When I drift away from my core trying too hard to understand the world, things become muddled, and I feel lost and scared, seeking guidance from others.
“Lightly child, lightly.” To be lost is to be found, in that instant.
Let us close with a poem that was gifted to me some years ago.
I say “gifted” because I believe that when we are let into someone’s innermost depths through the words they choose to offer us as a ladder, which then become our own pathway, it is, indeed, the most precious gift for both.
David Whyte—"Sweet Darkness", "House of Belonging"
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your home
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
What you’ve just read is the result of tens of hours of writing and editing. If you find warmth, comfort, inspiration, joy, motivation, or anything else of value in these letters and would like to show your support, please consider becoming a deeply valued patron by upgrading to a monthly or yearly subscription. This will also give you access to the full archive. If you have a financial restriction, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
A question to you, dear reader:
What did you let go of to return home?
"Let us step through the door of self into the uncharted lands of our beings, unossified. Let us dare to live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement." Really nice, Justyna. And I love all the authors you quote; Huxley, Suzuki, Saramago. Did you recently read Island? I read that years ago but I still often think of the talking parrot when I repeat to myself, "Attention! Pay attention!"
It is the small things that bring me alive — the small things that tended to my broken heart after Barbara died. Those same small things help tend to my aloneness and my solitude now. Five and a half years have passed since that horrid predawn darkness when the burning and the clenching of my heart cast me into the great abyss of Without. I was without myself, lost and flung to the furthest reach of the universe. Now my universe is this 100 acre forest that is glorified by the unending cycles of the seasons. A hilltop forest that has been made sacred through my grief and the myriad of small things I witness on my daily rounds. I have grown to know all the denizens from hemlock to yellow birch to the great red oak that looks over my wife’s cairn. Time and time again lost to the sound of the northern wind and the slow sensuous sway of the lofted crown of the white pine. This heart lifted skyward to join and embrace this high dance where the spirit of my beloved spreads wide the sweep of her silvery wings.
I have become the ornamental gargoyle moved from our flower garden to a solemn outpost standing vigil in the watchtower of a tripod red maple. A still and steely eyed gaze, unrelenting and unfaltering as the gate and gatekeeper to the deepest stretches of this realm. To be both tireless and adrift to the sounds and the sounding of deep granite bedrock and a quiet heart. To find one’s place at the center of a square parcel of woodland that had always been awaiting my arrival, my duty, my allegiance, and my affection.
Thank you, Justyna. This poem by David Whyte has been my anthem back to myself since the death of my wife.