Freedom Means Letting Go
"A jeweler who wants to re-fashion an ornament first melts it down to shapeless gold. Similarly, one must return to one's original state before a new name and form can emerge. Death is essential for renewal."
- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
When 2020 began I was working hard to rebuild my life after losing my home, my pets, and my most intimate and supportive relationships in a painful and unexpected divorce. I couldn't know then that 2020 would bring even more disruption and dissolution.
Social distancing requirements of the pandemic meant losing the bulk of my self-employed income, in-person classes, trainings, workshops and retreats. It also made it difficult to build new intimate relationships and establish the robust personal support network us social creatures require to thrive.
I went on unemployment for the first time in my whole life. I learned how to embrace a simpler, humbler way of living. I went exploring alternative communities and more affordable areas of the country to potentially put down roots. (I tracked that whole adventure on Instagram and in Nowhere Village if you want to check out what I learned.)
Ultimately, I landed in Ft. Worth, Texas, my birthplace. I will be here a while, immersed in family life, giving and receiving support, experiencing belonging, and moving toward freedom, one simple step at a time.
::::::
"Freedom means letting go. People just do not care to let go of everything. They do not know that the finite is the price of the infinite, as death is the price of immortality."
::::::
Here I'm called "Odie," the name my youngest brother gave me when he was learning to form words in his tiny mouth and couldn't say, "Aaron." When I get stressed out about work, I remember that my real job is just being here, belonging here, loving and being loved. I remember that every time my career gets a re-set, it's toward better serving others. Not being so focused on "me," the anxiety dissipates.
Yes, sometimes, especially around Christmas, I yearn to hold those kids the future-children that I planned for my entire life but never manifested. Then I turn toward my beloved nieces and nephew. They are real, their needs are real, their love is real, and I'm here for it.
Sometimes I miss my beloved dogs, which I never got to see again after the divorce. In those moments I take my brother's 4-month-old puppies for a floppy jaunt around the block. Their soft and squishy puppy bodies are right here. The smile they bring to my face and the gushy chemicals that surge through my system are real medicine.
::::::
"Spiritual maturity lies in the readiness to let go of everything. The giving up is the fist step. But the real giving up is in realizing that there is nothing to give up, for nothing is your own."
::::::
When I wonder what is mine, I sit and breathe and feel Life coursing through me and remember: none of it. That's what makes it all so beautiful and huge and worth belonging to. That's what makes me a beloved part of life, that I am not in its owner or controller. What matters is belonging to it and participating in what's most real and true about it. I just have to be somebody's Odie.
In another way of speaking, it's ALL mine--my work, my home, my kids, my dogs, my air and light and water. But all of it can give itself to me because everything here is FREE.