Release

Many years ago, I read a book called "The Secret of Letting Go," by Guy Finley. (Have I mentioned this before? I couldn't find that I had.) The book's opening story has stayed with me as a metaphor for its thesis. A man digs in a cave for many years, convinced there is treasure. He creates a whole infrastructure from which to chip away at walls and floors, yet day after day, year after year, he finds nothing. One morning, he hears the ear-splitting noise of falling rock; the cave and all his scaffolding are starting to collapse, and he realizes with horror that all his efforts are about to go to naught. As huge boulders fall from above, he thinks he's going to die and he gives up completely. Yet a few minutes later, he realizes that he is still alive. Once he dusts himself off, he looks up to a brilliant gem-encrusted ceiling. It wasn't until he gave his dream and himself up for dead that he found what he had been looking for.

Something like that happened a few days ago. In the spring, I had started to plan a short August trip to sing in England, but by last week, it was not coming together and I realized that my last seven years (or strictly speaking, a lifetime) of trying to manifest a life devoted to English church music was simply done. I had run out of steam, and even a short trip over there seemed beyond my grasp. It was time to release, to let go of the whole enterprise for the second and final time. In fact, releasing was the only thing that felt like relief. I realized that to love, to be loved back, and to inspire, were even more important to me than this specific place and musical tradition. Yet literally, literally, the minute I somehow found the words to say "I give up and it's OK," the minute I gratefully embraced the possibility that I had done all I could in this lifetime, the pieces fell into place to make this short trip. A snippet of my gem-encrusted ceiling revealed itself. I still see this as a bookend trip, an "I love this beautiful musical world but I have to move on" trip, but I am going.

When you are a creative person, it is so hard to give up before you see your creation fully realized in front of you. When you are in a culture that values success, it is so hard to accept that you have been a big-picture failure. The reality of acknowledging, at 61, that you really never created what you spent a lifetime focused on is humiliating. And yet...maybe allowing the ceiling to really, fully crash is creating an unexpected opening to an even broader success. I'm dusting myself off and wiping the gook out of my eyes and pinching myself. I'm still alive. Good first step!