Holding On and Letting Go

I found myself in tears this morning.

Unexpectedly.
Suddenly.
Wrenchingly.

Because sometimes, something, or someone, reaches through the veil.

And touches us.

On TBS this morning, they were running one of my ( don't know if I should say, "favorite" - perhaps "most meaningful" fits the bill better) episodes of ER: the one where Mark (who is ill with an inoperable brain tumor) takes his teenage daughter to Hawaii in a last ditch effort to connect with her and pass something on before he dies.

He keeps telling her stories about her childhood, about his. She finally blows up at him, yelling that she doesn't remember all this "crap" that doesn't matter. How many parents have heard that one before? Ouch.

Yet, in the waning moments of his life, she grasps his hand and manages to push through the veil that is already drawing near her family, and says quietly, simply, profoundly...

"I remember."

That was when the tears began to noisily gush out, accompanied by nose blowing. Real crying, as opposed to cinematic crying, is neither gentle, nor pretty.

But it is cathartic.

I put down Morocco, looked up through the skylights in my studio, through the barest branches of winter trees, through the veil that everyday life draws across our existence, and cried,

I remember.

My mother died from an inoperable brain tumor over ten years ago. I went there. I did that. I will wear the tee shirt for the rest of my life.

There is pain in remembering, but there is also meaning. And I will not shy away from the pain if it helps me to open that space within, where the heart, the soul, the light abides.

I heard once (I don't remember where) that the reason death exists is because, without it, we would not properly value life. It seems we do not treasure that which is ours in abundance, in perpetuity, ad infinitum. We can only live this day fully, presently, soulfully, if we comprehend its fragility.

We can only hold on to our humanity by letting go of immortality.

In knitting, as in life, it is all about creative tension. Hold on too tight and we can't fit our sweaters over our heads (or our love handles.) It pulls and catches us. It binds us up in all the wrong places. Let go too loosely and our sweaters lack definition. They sag, they stretch, they lose their shape. Gauge (balance) is critical.

Hold onto life too tightly and we tie ourselves up in knots. Let go and our lives can lose their definition.

So, what do we hold onto and what do we let go?

I remember.

That's what we hold onto. Because, in remembering, we assign meaning to the lives of those we remember, and to our own. We allow ourselves to be pierced by life, opened from the inside out.

And in the process, we let go of the meaningless, we loose our spirits.

To our great good and our world's great glory.

There will be a lot of noise this week about love. About how expensive jewelry, and candy, and the ubiquitous long stemmed red roses prove we care.

I am glad this morning, because something rose above the noise.

Because I "found' myself

in tears.