Letting go
Through first acknowledging what has been built and no longer serves
This summer, I found myself lying on the rough grass underneath the swaying, dancing limbs and leaves of two ash trees.
I wrote about this relationship that I’ve formed with these beauties before here, if you’re curious.
Something had been brewing all summer as I lay there and watched the quality of light change from glinting, high-up-in-the-sky beams to low, soft autumn waves, all while the seasons moved through their paces into winter.
I would lie there, sometimes wrapped up in a winter coat, hood up against the biting wind, to feel the sensation of being fully held by the ground beneath me, a living and breathing part of the world touching every part of my body, holding me.
I was so lonely. But within seconds of giving myself over to the grass and moss and mud, sheltered by the fingers of those ash trees, I felt myself melt and let go and breathe. Truly breathe, as if for the first time all day. The world would feel safe again and I would feel connected to something bigger than myself, like the weight of all my worries and doubts were shared with the world around me.
Over the last few weeks of lying there on my daily walks with Inis, I watched some of the leaves that I’d grown attached to in the summer months, peel away from the budded ends of the ash trees, and fall. My first reaction was sadness. I clung to the warmth of the air and longed for the world to spin backwards so that we could be in summer again, and the ash trees could be full of foliage. Then I thought of the compost and blanketing protections these fallen leaves offered up to the winter ground, and how this seeming loss was actually part of the restorative growth and nutrition for next year. It seems so obvious to describe a process that happens time and again, year in, year out, but I think we’ve lost sight of the importance of witnessing and processing every season of our lives. Nature is the mentor in doing this. We’ve just been trained to be too distracted to notice.
This late autumn, days into watching the leaves fall, I started to exhale more deeply as I watched them, matching up my long exhale with their drop down to the ground.
Let go. Let go, the leaves said.
Again, it seemed so obvious. My hyperactive brain started buzzing with condescending thoughts.
“Yes! Let go! Let go of all your bullshit and planning, let go of all those gnawing limiting beliefs that are keeping you so stuck and small and insignificant. Let all your shit go!”
I was well and truly sick of myself. Sick of the tightness in my stomach and my sore neck and shoulder muscles. Sick of my scrolling and big ideas with no direction. Sick of my anxiety and overplanning. Sick of my fear of stepping outside of the world that I created this past two years that is so unrecognisably tiny, just to stay manageable.
The leaves kept falling.
The thoughts kept coming.
And I kept trying to mindfully and gently circle back to the idea of letting go, without letting my brain beat my gentle and weary soul to a pulp.
Weeks passed. I was still in planning mode. I intended to move to Spain. Saving and organising, researching the hell out of everything. This is something you want, I kept telling myself. The weather, the food, the surf, the untouched nature of the North, the cheap land. I still kept feeling sick and tight to my stomach, and then would beat myself up, telling my worries off for raising their ugly heads with this un-nameable feeling of deep insecurity. My nervous system was frazzled.
I flew to Santander for two nights and three days, a scouting expedition to see how it felt in my body to be back in Spain after three years, to see the sea and forests and taste a good, cheap cup of coffee, and taste great food. I knew it would be cold and busy in the lead-up to Christmas and figured it would be a great time to see and feel the place out without the romance of good weather.
My period arrived three days early, on the flight on the way over from Dublin. Since starting my herbalism course, the tonics and daily herbs I take have revolutionised my monthly menstrual cycle, bringing a peace and ease I didn’t know was possible. But I am also a firm believer that a woman’s cycle is a key health indicator, not just physically but also mentally and emotionally. If shit hits the fan in the weeks leading up to your period, and you don’t account for that with adequate care, nutrition, rest and movement, get ready to be flattened by cramps, crying and mental chaos when your bleed arrives.
And so it was with me.
Friday evening, adamant I wanted to walk around the city and explore it, the muscles in my legs vibrated with chills and painful spasms. On Saturday morning, I woke to a swollen belly, tense legs, puffy face, bags under my eyes, and an urge to nest under the duvet for the day with soup and hot chocolate. But I had rented a car for the day to scout towns within thirty minutes of the coast to potentially live once I moved to Spain. The drill sergeant in my mind told me to get on with it. I ignored my body’s call for softness and followed orders. I collected the car at 9.30 am. Car trouble ensued within twenty minutes. The car cut out, decelerated, and wouldn’t start at different points throughout the day until I gave up at 3.30 pm, and went back to my Airbnb to pull the covers over my head and weary body. It felt like a waste, a failure.
A failure.
Such an unkind label.
The Sunday morning before I left was the light I needed. My sweet friend Ríona (the Irish word for Queen) brought me to the sea before food and my flight, for a fresh swim that washed the unkind words from my mind and made me feel thankful for the random ways friendships can form.
I spent about a week afterwards adrift. Something desperate wanted to be released, shed, and I couldn’t tell what it was.
I distracted myself with to-do lists and busyness, my survivalist way of getting through a crisis. I watched myself, like a ghost, go through the usual maladaptive motions that had carried me, wired and tired, through most of my adult life. I sighed at the thought that even with that self-awareness, the habits that were built into my skin and bones, still believed so strongly that they were keeping me safe. I could see myself and my own thought and behaviours causing me the most grief and suffering. But these ways are the only path I’ve known. In a way, they’ve kept me safe, kept me going, moving, one foot on front of the other when staying still felt scary. In reality, these instinctive ways of behaving and “dealing” where what was keeping trapped, and not the external life circumstances I blamed.
Looking back, not making the move to Spain, not being self-employed (yet), not writing regularly or having a garden or my own house, or a close in-person community, were all failures in my mind. They were proof for all the world to see that I was all talk and no action. That seventeen-year-old Grace who was sick of Ireland’s small-mindedness and dreamt of permaculture gardens and cob houses, longboard surfing and long, hot summers in her home in a land far away, that Grace had failed to realise her escapist dream. That notion of finally feeling happy and safe and herself when she had managed to line up all the elements required for such a place to exist.
I want to hug her. Her poor nervous system. Her poor frazzled mind. Her poor desperate and very real need for adventure and fun, patience and unconditional love.
I’ve spent the last year especially, beating myself up that I’m not as adventurous (read risk-taking with abandon) as I used to be. That I’ve lost my touch. That I’ve made my life unrecognisably simple and small and sad.
But something was brewing.
Last Sunday, I went with my cousin Donal and his wonderful wife Shyami to the Hill of Uisneach to witness Grianstad an Gheimhridh , the winter solstice.
We met in darkness, after following a pilgrimage of red tail lights of cars venturing to the site. Two druids lit tall black candles and guided us to a field next to the entrance to the farm. Over two hundred people in the darkness, we followed his guided meditation in silence.
He asked us to imagine ourselves walking up a familiar road to a cottage. Reaching the wooden door, and seeing a meaningful symbol carved onto the wood. In my meditation, I found myself tracing a spiral with my finger before pushing the door open and stepping inside the cob cottage with soft and rounded walls. There, by the tended fire, he said, there would be a guide. Maybe an ancestor, a mentor, a friend, a lover. They had been waiting for us.
My guide was who I imagined my German great-grandmother to be. My Mam tells me that I’m “the image of her”. She was a black sheep too, and a herbalist. Slight frame and long grey hair, the guide said that she would take my hand and we’d walk through the back door of the cottage, into a forest and out into a clearing, where the Hill of Uisneach would appear. There would be a passage tomb and we would walk in there, just the two of us. He asked us to imagine lying down on the clay ground, and our guide covering us with a heavy, dark blanket. Feeling the darkness all around. The emptiness. The quiet. The ending and the beginning in one. Then sensing and seeing the shard of winter light carve its way through the passage tomb and over me on the ground. Feeling enshrined by this golden glow of light. Then taking my great-grandmother’s hand and walking out of the tomb, to greet this new beginning.
I cried silent tears for the end of such a long journey, and the hopefulness I started to feel for a new beginning, one that wouldn’t be weighed down by all the heavy expectations that the first forty years of my life have held. I started to let go of the shame of not feeling fun enough, sociable enough, exciting or adventurous enough.
After the meditation, we made our way up the hill, past all the sacred Hawthorn faerie trees, to the top. Some people drummed. Some sang songs. Mostly, we stood facing the east, Brighid’s hill, and waited for the sun to rise. The clear night sky started to lighten, and clouds floated in and shapeshifted into forms that felt calming. To the north, the clouds looked like the sea, and the land dropping off down to the waves there. I felt my heart lift and lighten, and noticed just how much the simple sight of an imagined sea made my whole body feel alive and calm and whole. Between the sea and the eastern hill, layers of clouds peaked and looked like snow-capped mountains. I looked all around at the rolling hills dropping down to the flat lands of the midlands, and allowed myself to admit that though coming back to my hometown helped me to heal with the smallness I felt here, the sea and mountains would need to be part of my future.
As the sun rose, I thought of the seeds I wanted to plant for this coming year, the gratitude I had to be able to share this pivotal moment with newly-connected family, and the awareness that there is no failure in choosing to stay in the land I was born.
I have always loved Ireland but regular readers will know that I’ve felt haunted by younger versions of myself living here. Past relationships, past behaviours, past habits of feeling lost and forlorn and those feelings attaching to certain beaches, coves, pubs, towns, and people across Ireland. There was a lot of shame there too. And comparison with others who seemed to have more stability and love in their lives, or at least knew how to hit those socially acceptable life markers.
But standing on the hill of Uisneach, I thought back to my ancestors, who would have stood on that hill over 6,000 years ago, hoping for the sun to return, for seeds to grow and families to form, and connections with nature to continue to be honoured by their tribes, and I felt such gratitude. Gratitude for all the learnings, all the mistakes, all the doubts and the energy and drive I had to explore the hell out of this island and this world. All the while looking for answers, for some peace and calm after a lifetime of struggle.
I did not magically find that at Uisneach last Sunday.
But I did feel what it is to let go of the greatest limiting belief of all.
To stay and build a home in Ireland, a quiet and simple place of restoration, love and care; that is not uncool or unworthy or a failure by any means.
That is a homecoming.
That is a homecoming that could only ever have come about through building up decades worth of experiences, beliefs, challenges, and flaws…only to let them go and make space for something new and different.
New seeds. New growth.
The next cycle.
Who knows what it will bring.
More compost for the soul, no doubt.
Winter blessings to you all.
Big love,
Grace
