Letting Go Of The Past

This is not a depressing post. It is a post about a change in perspective.

This is a summer of beginning old things again in new ways. Gardening, writing stories with a friend, picking up my fiber art once more. In the last 24 hours I have experienced a shift, some sadness, some tears, a little fear, and an awakening. I have answered dear ones today who wrote comments in after yesterday’s blog post about returning to my fiber work as well as having answered private emails from friends around the globe. What came up for me over and over again was the certain knowledge that the only way I was going to succeed with any of this is to let go of all of the old ideas about how I did these things before.

I will never be able to create the gardens I once did, big, elaborate gardens with lots of garden art everywhere, a towering Magic Ship in one corner and countless people who came and said it looked like it had come out of a Dr. Seuss book. It was grand and glorious and lots of fun, but that garden is gone, the ship was destroyed by a falling tree the week after the fire, the garden art all carted off when the house was up for sale because the garden had mostly died out due to fire damage, and damage from being trampled by firemen and construction workers who rebuilt the house and plain old neglect. But there is more. Due to the kind donations of a couple of people I got a garden in pots going on my deck. I have recently planted the old green gated garden area with thousands of seeds, things are coming up, and, I don’t know how to say this, I am grateful, deeply grateful, but my heart is not in it. I am doing it, I have tried, but I am so overwhelmed by it all, and the hot weather is here, temperatures can hover around 100 degrees with 100 percent humidity for months on end, the mosquitoes are so fierce and come in such clouds here I come in all bitten up just to be outside for a few minutes to get the dogs out, and I just can’t bear it. I am getting out to water the things in pots but half way through June I am already barely going outside.

I love gardens, and I have loved gardening, and I think I have been struggling with the memories of what this garden had once been and the terrible sense of loss over what it had been is keeping me from enjoying what is. And the hot weather, something I never liked, I can barely bear now. I am trying to find my way with this.

Writing stories, or any kind of writing at all, was never something I did for the fun of it. I wrote to publish, and though I wrote several books that never ended up getting published I did publish a lot in magazines, newspapers, anthologies, and small presses. I always wrote with a goal in mind, and while I enjoyed it, writing is my deepest soul work, there is an inner imperative, it is something I must do, I never did it purely for pleasure. Writing the 700 word stories that my dear friend Katya and I are now doing, sending them back and forth to each other, is such a delight I am in awe of the whole process. It is an interesting thing, this business of doing a thing for pleasure vs. doing it for monetary reward. I could dearly use additional income, there is no doubt about that, but at this point it is a complicated issue as I have written about elsewhere. When you take the pressure of “If I do this I can make $xxx…” and do it for the sheer joy of it it does something to you. For me, right now, I don’t have a choice, but it is eye-opening, this creating for the joy of it.

And then there is the fiber art. I wrote yesterday that I was uncertain, and even afraid, about beginning again. I did some spinning last night and then overnight fears came up. I woke up at 6:30 this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep, I tried for some long time and couldn’t and got more and more anxious, afraid, and teary. What was I doing, opening up this can of worms? And then a couple of dear souls wrote in, one saying she would like to see the kind of fiber art I made, and another one saying she would like to buy some of the yarn I would make. Oh no, I thought. No. For me it throws me into a place of thinking about what I once did, what I used to do. And, like the garden, I cannot do and be what I once was. It isn’t in me anymore. I am older, with fewer resources, I have been through a few very hard years, and there is no going back to the way things used to be in any area of my life. And I realized in that moment that that was what was wrong. Everything I have been trying to do today I have held up to the way things used to be. And they will never be what they used to be again. And that’s okay. And if, when, I stop trying to measure the value of what I do today with the way I used to do it, then and only then can I accept what is, the way it is, now.

And then I realized for the first time that this is all about “Ageing Gracefully.” And what is ageing gracefully? It is a series of letting go of things that we have held onto because of what they once meant to us, and this is scary, and sometimes sad, and often heartbreaking. But until we do let go of those things that once were we can never be happy and at peace today. Ageing gracefully is about making the most of the life we do have, today, in this moment. Not how it used to be, but what it can be today. It was huge to realize how very hard I was holding onto all the “used to be’s.” And I think part of me has lived in a state of longing and dreaming for some magic to come along that would make things the way they were before the fire. And that is not ever going to happen. It can’t, and further, it shouldn’t. The life I had before the fire died in the flames that night. And the life that I’m meant to have now, today, is in my hands to create. And having a small garden in pots, writing stories with a friend, and doing a little fiber work are all things that are laying the foundation for my future life. I have no clue what bits and parts and pieces of these things will move forward into something more, something maybe even income producing, but building a new life starts with letting go of the past. It is as though today I turned around and looked back over my 64 years, I shed a tear, I felt the sadness well up and over and out, and I turned around and faced the other direction. It is time to make a new life.

Ageing gracefully is not about living a diminished life, it is not something “less than,” it is, as I think about it, a life of more, because when we are younger we can be involved in so many things, too many things, that we never really get to the marrow and go deep with the things in our lives. As we get older we must needs let go of all of the too-muchness of youth and in doing so we are able to go much deeper with the things that we do do. I think we can go deeper in our relationships with other people as well. I am finding amazing new things opening up for me now, and while I am nervous, I am finding myself more willing than I heretofore imagined that I might be. It is eye-opening. It is, in fact, a revelation.

Yesterday I signed up online for a meet-up group, a “Stitch and Bitch” group that meets at a yarn shop downtown on Sundays at 2:00. I’ll be honest, I’m not quite sure that I will go, but I wrote the director of the meetup group, who is the owner of the yarn shop, asking her if I would be a good fit for the group. I even shared yesterday’s post. Being self-taught, not following patterns, just beginning again, well, I wasn’t sure I would be a good fit, and in the pictures all the women look so young. It’s not that I mind their age but in the last dozen years or so I have gotten up the nerve to attend a couple of different kinds of groups and honestly everyone was so young and in such a different place and I truly did not fit at all so that I was deeply uncomfortable and didn’t go back. I don’t want to go through that again. But I did make a little step in that direction. We shall see.

Today I did spin a little more. I am spinning without a destination in mind, or rather my only destination is to fill this one spindle with yarn. I don’t have to know any more than that. Tomorrow, who knows? But I see this as a period of letting go of things as well as taking new things on. It is a transformative time. In this moment, feeling more courageous than I did when I got up this morning, I am looking forward to what tomorrow may bring. That’s a start. I’ll go on from here.