-To Love is To Let Be-
There is an unruly and wild horse within us, and I want you to keep yours running into the horizons you are in love with, grazing through the miles of swaying ground that love you back, flying and alive. The traces of playfulness and charm in your words and movements make the world a safe place for dancing, for spreading out our arms and hugging life’s offerings. Being alive is to welcome and nurture the healthy need for a new page, a new spice, a new experience–it is human and necessary. Loving someone is wanting them to keep their mad spark, their whipping and dancing flame of aliveness—loving not just someone in a romantic sense, but anyone, everyone. It looks like: wanting our neighbors to keep their loud backyard parties, and feeling joy and excitement about music and cultures around you that are not your own–that you haven’t seen or heard before. Celebrating all of the questions of children–the absurd, apprising, enlightening, and unnerving wonderings that are so very telling of the world we’ve made, and how little we really know. Letting children be children–letting them have prolonged periods of silliness and unstructured play. Allowing all of the grandiose and nonsensical and high-hoped reveries of our friends, and of all of the strangers we come by, to go un-challenged, and let off any leash of resistance.
As Saturn goes retrograde beginning tomorrow, June 4th, we are called to examine the structures we have made for ourselves–the foundations of our livelihood, where we want to invest energy, our currency, and then where there are boundaries worth enforcing which allow you to simply be. Depending on how you look at it, Saturn can be a planet of bore–of father-time laws and restrictions and balancing of checkbooks, or it can be a planet that you use to your advantage–you make the rules you want to reinforce, you are disciplined in what you feel is worth being disciplined about, you create limitations and boundaries around things that do not allow for more freedom, more play. We are living in a time where laid-out structures deemed as permissible and un-permissible are deteriorating.
In every classroom, every organization of learning, the “other” boxes are growing, and children continue to challenge a sit-down-and-listen framework that does not work. What we will continue to find is that where there is more space and time to play, and where curiosity is nurtured and encouraged, there is less friction, less tension, less “behavior problems”. In anything where spirit is void—packets are filled in and forgotten, adults are authoritative figures to obey—there will be defiance and pressure to come up with solutions that have never been implemented before. “To love is to let be”—not to tame, to control, to monitor, or to punish. To love our children is to ask them what they’re interested in, what they care about, what brings them joy, and then to allow for models of teaching and learning to bend, mold, break down and rebuild.
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I am in Iceland, and it is 3:44am. My two travel mates—my friend of 26 years and my partner are sleeping. Yesterday we drove for 6-7 hours after being on a flight for 7 hours, and by the time we got into bed our eyes were burning. It is always daylight here, but blackout curtains are common and a little light never prevented me from sleeping. These days my body craves the stillness of the before-hours, and when I stirred awake and realized I was the only one awake I seized the opportunity.
There are birds along the coast in front of me, just behind the trees that resemble rounded pines. Their white wings are dipping low and back up in figure eights just a few feet above the black sand and water. “Oh, to be a bird” I thought yesterday again and again.
I’ve had more dreams of flying this year than any other year, and with every dream that comes I learn a little more and get a little better at surrendering to the lift offs. I’m able to stay in the air longer and it is tricky coming down. Parallel to these dreams in my moon world, in my waking day I’ve noticed old songs in new ways and they’re often about the take off and landing of things.
The fact that we can be conscious and aware of concepts, feelings, processes—we can “know” them but not really understand them until they’re happening within and around us—is an ever-apparent trend in life. I’ll read a poem I’ve always read and felt but for the first time I feel in a different way and it seems as though it followed me to this moment. Anyway, that’s all I can really say about that. I’ve grown tired of talking about myself, therefore also writing about myself. There is a shushing I’ve been doing lately toward any part of me that wants to explain who I am or defend something. I’m interested in the microscopic and macroscopic details. And I suppose we are always talking about and telling on ourselves, even when we are talking about the way volcanic rock looks like it has imitated a bird’s wings, or bird’s wings have imitated volcanic rock.
I am going to be going through old posts over the next few months and editing, deleting (but still saving of course), extracting the lines and phrases I’d like to expand upon, turn into a poem, an article, a letter, a song. I’ve been working on this post since Friday and between looking at a version of myself in the rear view mirror and getting ready for this incomprehensibly beautiful country to be enjoyed, this is all that has been conjured and is being conjured.
Underneath what isn’t being laid out on the dinner table that is this post, is a world of nutrients and mycelium threads intertwining in the dark. So I’ve been reading and listening and choosing the quiet, even if that means being misunderstood or unheard. When the crystal I tied onto my partners wrist came undone, I told her to just put it in her backpack, and I said “no one needs to see it in order for it to work anyway” and I thought about that for a long time on the flight.
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Invocations, Love Letters, Perlocutionary Acts 