Let Us Go

Every year I return to my birthplace, my culture of origin in the suburbs outside Washington, D.C. We enter through the manicured interface of airports like the last quiet hush of personal thoughts and meditations and wishes where most other travelers distract themselves in books or personal music or sleep. It is a digital illusion this world of very limited spaces and options that confines the soul into pre-programmed outcomes while insisting through material accumulation that we are entering a world of abundance, of endless possibility. Looking up from these thoughts, pondering soul’s eventual rage as seen in the small tantrums which spike through the modern child’s day, I noticed a message scrawled by a young person’s hand in the fine layer of dust on the tall airport windows: Let Us Go it reads in 2 feet high lettering with palm print accents at the end of each letter. Let us go the graffiti reads transparent on glass, but only seen from certain angles, the dust is so fine. Let us go the message screams most likely at the waiting, a delay, the powerless of airport travel, but carrying a deeper vibration all the more rooted in our human longing by the hand-prints, the fluidity of palm making shape, giving voice and I am humbled, I am quiet because I know we all have to let ourselves go, let it all go, that there is no keeper at the gate: we have entrapped ourselves. I am here in my birth culture attempting to blend-in because I want to see my loved ones, confirm and share our love, but deep inside I am transforming and learning to let go of the pasts that haunt and hurt and fill with fear and rage. Letting go of possession, of obsession, of material consumption. Letting go of reaction, embracing observation, controlling my temper, my desire, my fear. Why do we come here, to a place I find so hard to navigate, so confusing to understand? Because it is in these temptations at 33 that I can find who I truly am, my Jesus metaphor turning allegory. It is here at my roots that I can learn to let go of rejection, of all my childhood fighting, and learn to embrace my whole that allows me the freedom to live the rest of the year in my forest sanctuary. This is not a journey of a prophet, this is a journey of my personal transformation and the letting go we each must manifest in our individual lives, or be consumed by.