Night Vision

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving

up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing

as a woman takes up her needles

and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let the dew collect on the hoe abandoned

in long grass. Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.

Let the wind die down. Let the shed

go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop

in the oats, to air in the lung

let evening come.
Let it come, as it will and don't

be afraid. God does not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come.

Jane Kenyon

We all have to learn when to let go. There is a natural reluctance in most of us to do this. Even when we truly know what we are holding on to be it jobs, relationships, things--is not what we want or need, we often try to convince ourselves that at least we have something. The empty place that is created by a release is what we are not so sure about.

Have you noticed that every day ends the same way, with the sun going down, but that the manner in which it does is never, ever the same? Sometimes there are gorgeous colors, sometimes just a cloudy sky or sometimes it's raining and the day simply fades. The release of light to the dark still occurs but how evening comes has a lot of different ways of arriving. It is the same with letting go.There are moments when we make decisions straight out. We know what is best for us to choose and we do it. More often though it is a much murkier experience and we go back and forth about what to do-- what to do--what to do. But probably the hardest times  is when we are struggling to muster the courage to let go of something that will change an important part of how we go about our lives. Then all we wish is that it would simply be over without us having to go through the letting go to get there.
It is our human nature to seek connection. We want a task awaiting, another's hand in ours, a clear path ahead. Life however, follows nature's lead. In order to make way for the new, there must be an end to the old. Leaves fall, songbirds die, days end, seasons change. Even when we realize we are no exception it is still easy to fear what we believe is an empty dark. We forget that the night that follows the sun has its own beauty. Good things happen in the night. We rest, we prepare ourselves for the next day, we get a chance to think about what might come next, we dream. It is a fertile place where new things can manifest.  Letting go is essentially a clearing out instead of a losing. We create room when we do, to turn the power of our interest and attention to opportunities, experiences and understandings that were obscured by what we had outgrown.
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"Some nights stay up 'til dawn as the moon sometimes does for the sun. Be a bucket pulled up the dark way of a well then lifted out into light. Something opens our wings, something makes boredom and hurt disappear.Someone fills the cup in front of us, we taste only sacredness."

13th century, Persian