The light in late summer in Santa Fe starts pretending it is autumn before the calendar has signed off on it. I had been watching that pretense for about a week when this entry began to assemble itself in my head.
There are things I let go of in August 2023 that I am not going to name here. If you're reading this and you know what I mean, you know. That is all the specificity this particular moment deserves. I have learned — it took a while, and the learning was not always graceful — that not every wound needs to be displayed to be real. Some healing is private. The scar is its own record. I have made peace with what I needed to make peace with, and the peace held, and that is the whole story that needs to be told.
What I will say is that letting go is one of the harder verbs. Love as a living practice requires the ability to release what cannot be held — people who need room to become who they're becoming, chapters that have finished, versions of yourself you've genuinely outgrown. None of that is painless. None of it should be. Pain is not a sign you're doing it wrong. Pain is a sign it mattered. The two are not the same thing, and confusing them leads to a lot of unnecessary suffering.
August 2023 mattered because the open hand was not theoretical anymore. I was practicing it in real time, with real history attached. The month did not make letting go painless, but it did make it clean enough to trust. Sometimes that is the most loving shape a season can take.
When Love Lets Go
To love, you set them free, Though pain remains, they go. What’s right is hard to see, Love grows when it lets go.
Read it in Echoes: Whispers From The Soul →I wrote this poem after sitting with the question longer than I expected to need. I had thought I already understood it — the concept is not new, and I am generally a person who grasps things in theory well ahead of practice. But August 2023 gave me a version of the concept that was specific and real and required actual application rather than appreciation of the principle. Theory is fine. Practice is where it actually happens.
The Santa Fe chapter was giving me something back by August — a sense of being located. Not just geographically, though the mountains help with that enormously and in ways that are not entirely explainable to someone who hasn't experienced them. I mean located in myself. The right place, the right people, the right rhythm for the life I was actually living. When you find that, some older, less fitting things naturally release. Not always gently. But they release.
I had good evenings that August. Long slow ones. Dinners that lasted past the point of eating and became something else entirely. The kind of nights that make you aware you are living something worth remembering, while it's happening, which is a specific and uncommon gift.
Hold tightly what asks to be held. Open wide for what needs to go. Knowing the difference is a skill you build over a lifetime, one specific August at a time, and it is absolutely worth every minute you spend building it.