Learning to Love Letting Go

(Original piece published here.)

In the lead up to Valentine’s day as a child, my mother, my sister and I would spend an afternoon decorating valentines. Out would come the box of supplies: doilies, paper, glitter, stamps in various shapes and sizes. Acts of love, stuffed into envelopes, filled with sugar. Even then, I liked celebrating love.

I am nothing if not a disciple to Love. Love is what moves the cosmos. Love is what brings life into being, and what watches it exit form into formlessness. On this day that celebrates Love, I am always vaguely put out by the Hallmark pointedness of the holiday. As if Love was not worthy of celebrating every other day. I’ll take the chocolate and the flowers, though.

I find myself thinking a lot about Binah, the third sephira (sphere) on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Binah, which means “understanding” in Hebrew, is the realm of the Divine Feminine, the place of deep receptivity, the womb of creation out of which all of life springs. Binah receives the emitting energy of the second sphere, Chokhmah (the masculine), and together they create, leaping across the great abyss from the celestial realms into the realms of the manifest.

It is said that the vision associated with Binah is the Vision of Sorrow. To birth something into being is also to birth an inevitable ending. Grief, sorrow, and loss are interwoven, co-created when something springs into existence. Love, in all its aspects, includes loss and letting go.

It is hard to learn to love letting go. We grow attached to our visions of how things are and how we think they are supposed to be. Endlessly over the course of the day, I watch my daughter grieve small losses. Today, it was that we were out of the sparkly pink heart stickers she wanted to use to decorate her valentine. Some losses are small, others much larger. I watch the news of the Ukraine, wondering what kind of loss of life is poised to occur. I read about the spread of vegetation in the Antarctic, and I grieve the vision of the world I had hoped might be possible for my child.

In the path of Somadelics, psilocybin (magic mushrooms) are great teachers on how to work with loss. They are the relentless decomposers, tricksters with a fabulous sense of humor. They ferret out the shadows we have hidden from ourselves, the dark places, seeking damp earth by working their way through that which cannot stand any longer. That which wants to die.

In the old ways, death and birth were merely two sides of the same coin, and it was understood that death was not permanent, so much as the beginning of something new. Birth co-arises with death and rebirth. In my inner realms, I have been diligently deconstructing, brick by brick, the paradigms that live in me based in oppression. Michael Meade says that as the old paradigms die, we can rest assured that birth is just around the corner, is co-occurrent with decomposition. So here we are: building altars with tears and love, honoring the sacredness of what has been and what was, what is and what shall be…