Passages come to us unexpectedly, often with a death in the family or a parent going to a retirement home, and when this door opens up we have to go through—often with tears flowing and emotions boiling over—to the new possibilities passages always bring to us. But whether we go through this door into a new world or see it as a revolving door to our old world is entirely up to us. That is our freedom.
These last two months I have been helping Glenn, the youngest of three in the James and June Powell family, empty his parents’ house of a lifetime of memories and projects unfinished. Our lives are always a mixture of the two, and Jimmy and June were full of dreams and ideas that would make the world a better place to live. Most got completed, but, I can say this with great affection, if everyone was like Jimmy, who died a few years ago, we wouldn’t need landfills. Jimmy even kept the parts to worn out toilets. Looking at this habit from a positive perspective, you could say that Jimmy saw something of value in everyone and everything.
But the point I wanted to make was that Glenn, as I said, the youngest and because he takes after his mother perhaps the more emotional of the two brothers, made this passage work for him. Every book, picture, old tool, and item his father had left had to go through his hands, and sometimes they were wet with tears. To make the passage correctly we have to grieve over the past and then let it go with our tears washing out the old limiting perceptions we had of who were were. So this was a good passage for Glenn, who is now leaving to start a new job in California, never to come back to this home again. Our families fill their closets with artifacts and our minds with grievances and self doubts. All this must go when we make the passage to a new and greater vision of who we are.
I really enjoyed helping Glenn take out this extended trash, as it helped me take out some of my trash too. We always grow when we can let go of what we are holding too close, and we grow best when we help others do the same.
There is an art to taking out the trash. Letting go of form, our material things that we collect, is a spiritual act of the deepest kind. Whether you keep the object in your hand or toss it is not the point. If you keep the object, you keep it with permission to let it go. So if suddenly a wind comes and whips it out of your hand, that’s okay. If it doesn’t and it stays, that’s okay too. 
This why no matter what happens in life to your stuff, you are always okay.
Posted under The Tao is
This post was written by ed on February 16, 2009
