Letting go – Sigrid Mortensen

Poetry

The Fixer

April 29, 2023

by Sigrid E. Mortensen

The fixer.

The tinkerer.

The repairman.

The fiddler.

The meddler.

The taker-apart.

The reassembler.

The one with the calm connection

The perspective

The insights

The inspired words

That ease what’s broken.

The one who hears the noises

The aches

The screeching cries, and who

By disassembling

Cleaning

Clearing

And piecing back together

Eases the fears

The angers

The frustrations

The disappointments

That had been clogging up the gears.

So skilled was I

That I would oil every squeak

Even before it began

Spending more

And more of my time

Anticipating every soreness

Circumventing every pain.

And yet

My eyes grow cloudy

And my fingers clumsy

And I can no longer fix

Every complaint.

Despite my best efforts

The noises return

And scream fix me!

Fix me!

I yearn to help

And yet

I begin to understand

As my ability wanes

And my maturity waxes

That not every break

Is meant to be mended,

That not every intervention

Is a gift,

That sometimes the grit in the cog

Must work its way through

On its own,

That part of the grand design

Of this glorious machine

Is to allow the dirt in

And by sticking the gears

And jamming the pulleys

New pathways are grazed and gouged and formed

And beautiful new mechanisms

Are born.

The oyster’s sand is that from which the

Precious grows.

If I am brutally honest

I also nod to those times

When by taking it apart

I broke it more

Made it worse

Deepened the sorrow

Foiled my best intentions.

So finally

I retire

Step back

Look from a distance

And begin to see beauty in the rusty patches

Hear harmony in the creaks and groans

Notice the miracle of new life

Spontaneously sprung

From the remnants of what I once fled,

From what I once worked

So hard

To avoid,

From the ravages of time

And life

And entropy

And wrong turns

And missed opportunities

And crossed wires

And misfires

And parts worn through with age.

These are no longer my job to salvage

Indeed

Decay is the fertile ground

That feeds the desire

For scrapping the dysfunctional

For releasing old designs

For beginning

Finally

Anew.

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Poetry

The Folly of Hate

June 14, 2023

by Sigrid E. Mortensen

You don’t have to hate a thing

To let it go.

You don’t have to wait for the shirt

To fall into tatters in the closet

Or the leftovers to sour

And gather thick layers of mold

In the deepest recesses of the refrigerator.

You don’t have to hate a thing

To let it go.

You don’t have to rail against the home

Or the job

Or the relationship

That you once adored

But have long since outgrown.

You don’t have to find every fault in a thing

To rationalize bidding it adieu.

You can acknowledge

Simply

That it no longer fits

That desire for it has faded

That it no longer quite suits your current

Living

Appetites.

Just as it is not necessary

To stuff a body to revulsion

Before deciding to stop filling it with food,

So is it unnecessary

To feed on distaste for where you are

To get to where you want to go.

We humans seem to believe

That we must build a case

Argument by argument

Stacked solid and uncrackable

For leaving something behind.

We must have reasons.

There must be logic.

It must be possible for everyone else to see

And confirm

Our conviction.

They must all agree that we were in the right

To make a change in our world.

We somehow think that hate greases the hinges

Of the exit door

That it makes the opening wider.

But hate is a poor lubricant.

It grows old

And rancid

And sticky

And soon the door won’t swing.

What we often fail to see is that

In hating a thing

We bind ourselves the closer to it.

We sew threads of energy as strong as steel

From us to it and back again

One stitch more for every

Justification

Then wonder why we cannot shake the thing

For years to come,

Instead revisiting the trauma

That we ourselves have created by

Regularly traversing

Every strand of hate.

It is not necessary to hate a thing

To let it go.

No, in fact

The silicone spray that glides the path of true releasing

Lies in gratitude

In blessing

In love.

Thank your Leaving Thing.

Thank it for its role in your life.

Appreciate its contribution to your journey.

Remember the love

The hope

The promise you felt for it

Once

At the beginning

And send it on its way with sincerest desire

That it serve

In good stead

Another.

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