"Letting go" is something I feel is largely misunderstood by our disposably oriented culture.
Generally when others admonish one to "let go", it's for their own comfort, and they usually want it done their way, and now.

Letting go of a deep pain or loss is not quite like tossing out a soiled tissue.  In my experience it can only be done by wading into the depth of the experience, wallowing, drinking it in, becoming friends with the pain, until all the emotions are spent, and one comes to a place of acceptance.  The same loss that pains me is also my liberation - the rawness and the opening is like a cleansing wind blowing though my chest. 

I suppose this would be a secret to those who just want the emotions to go away on command.  Perhaps it's akin to alchemy.

Hi Mia,

The poem is so beautiful by the way it takes the emotion of loss to essential ground.  I was a little startled to read your topic; I had just posted to Rhea about nearly the same thing.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

Mia, does the song have to leave the flute for the I and Thou?  The world is born from the flute with its diversity, but at the expense of the whole—each entity, while unable to stand apart from the entirety of which it is but a part, must still vie against the whole to gain its own viability, to be able to feel and maintain the boundaries that set it apart.

The miracle is not only that we and a dear one are united in love, but more importantly, that love exists at all.  Love exists to keep the schism that allows it.  That’s the basis of self-reflection.  Love gives us a means to look back to ourselves; love lets us appear to others and lets them appear to us—but love refuses to do more.  A completely repaired world couldn’t say the word love.  So, we are a self-reflective people who must love, or must face the consequences of denying a love that only goes away when the world does.

Our dual natures, whole yet of individual parts, and divided from the rest, establishes the divine unease that characterizes especially our emotional lives, and that unease is the ground of language.  We have a hard time putting the narrating mind to rest because the tensions between words that give each one its meaning are exactly identical to the tensions between us that give each one of us our individual meanings.

Language is unable to pull the thorn from its heart because the thorn is the world’s genesis.  A many petaled self-reflection, a flower of echoes.  The love songs we sing to our beloved unfold like flowers opening—all the divergent little breaks and avalanches of daily life, because our troubles ask for responses, appear uncomplicate: only something simple gives life hope.  So… simple hope.

We keep the secret.  The only way to reveal it is how the world would collapse.  We keep something to ourselves in order for the world to form around us.  This beautiful art, collective life, goes back to sea when we forget; that is—when we remember that we are vapors.  Life’s only substantiator is deeper than secrecy, it is forgetting that we can forget.  When we turn our backs to our origins, then, and only then is hope.

And the only hope for language in the abstract to be words, and words to be meaning, is to have someone listening.

Ted suggests the difficult word love.
Well, but I would ask the question: is the pain of being separated from one's lover akin to the pain of exile?

I see how the analogy is useful, but I'm not sure it's the same agony. For one thing --
certainly it's not the same as long as one's lover is alive and well in the world -- or with someone else.

For instance, the return to the garden is not, exactly, a re-possession in the same way that erotic love might be. In that sense it is not exclusive. It might even be a collective project.  Nonetheless, as Rumi explains, it can be a private pain.

Rhea (mother of the gods!) mentions alchemy, and the resulting transmutations. I like this reading of secret. If one describes the philosopher's stone as a secret this word has a color different from that of, say, the secret of one's first love or the private secret of an unrealized dream, even if all three of these remain beyond the grasp of the fingertips.

I'll also second Molly's question about what alchemy is.