Letting Go

It's that time of year.

Me, we travel to this place (some call it the poor man's Galapagos) on the Sea of Cortez, about a third of the way down the bony finger of Baja California, where the desert meets the sea in ways I have only known in Greece (think Mani) and we let go. The whole year ends there and another begins. Yes, we know it's just a construct, these calendar pages but at the same time it's a useful construct and the earth does turn and the days do begin to grow again. The light gets longer, the darkness shorter. We come back from our week, our 10 days, our fortnight and we're ready to do it again. Something about the sea there, the rocks, the sea turtles, the people who care for them, the creak of the pelicans' wings, the flash of the fish jumping from the water, the islands, over a dozen jutting out from the blue, the quiet sunrises, the enormity of the spreading sand, the white beauty of the animal and bird bones I find there every year bleached by years in the sun. Years. Bahia de los Angeles.

Years ago, John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts were frightened of what they found there. Read all about it in "The Log from the Sea of Cortez." We were too, our first trip. It was too much. Now it no longer is. It is just right.

We let go of a lot of things this year, some willingly, many not so. It was hard. Still is.

I wake some mornings and imagine that death—a stooped figure—cackles in the corner of my bedroom. Death is a bad actor, a stock character whose cheesiness embarrasses me; after all, my consciousness must have created the creature. Still, it is forceful, frightening despite its cartoonish nature, persistent. This has got to stop, I tell myself, I tell the dream figure before it fades. But, of course, it won't. Death lives with life. Those bones on the beach, the ones beneath my own skin, my friends, my family, those in the family of things here, known to me and unknown, all living and dead.


And now, another Mary Oliver poem for my friend who I don't see often enough but who was kind enough to write:

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

- Mary Oliver

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