my grandmothers grief lives in me, alive, I try to let it go

How to let go:

• Relax your hands 

• Hold on lightly

• Breath 

• Feel the ground beneath you 

• Allow 

• Allow crying 

• Allowing screaming 

• Allow gratitude and ugly thoughts and running 

• And breaking shit 

• Allow the calm to come take you, fold you up and hold you in its hands 

• Allow exhaustion to run it’s fingers through your hair 

• Allow forgiveness

• Allow despair

• Allow yourself to forgive and allow yourself to laugh at the absurdity of things ending and people dying, perhaps evilly. Laugh at the fact that things existed in the first place and things fall apart

• Allow yourself to be cynical

• Allow yourself, at the most unexpected moment, when everything is going to shit, to find hope in something small like the impossible wonder of ice cream or winter ending.

• Allow wonder to find you, allow something ridiculous and beautiful and sweet to hit you with its full force and soften the whole of you being - like a butterfly landing in a impossibly breathtaking and gentle way on a flower petal or the palm of you hand or a dog licking a puppy with the most care and slobber.

• Allow wonder to find you 

• Allow yourself to soften 

• Allow the pace to change, the pain to come at new and different intervals.

• Allow yourself to have more space between the moments when you can’t breath and the moments when everything is freshwater and somewhat calm, allow space for the pace of those moments to change

•  Allow new things to take the foreground of your focus and then allow those same new things from time to time, be obscured by the pain of the thing you are letting go of and the new truth you are desperately trying to accept or refuse

• Allow yourself to be a mess

• Allow the mess to resolve on its own or allow others to help clean it up, allow yourself to watch them do it, to not want to help. Allow yourself to do what you will call laziness but probably is just rest.

• Eat unnecessary amounts of oranges and soups and strange deserts and other things other people who are not you may think are weird to eat all the time. 

• Allow the delight of all your decisions to make you smile and feel free when you want them to

• Dress only in the most decadent or comfortable of ways 

• Sit outside for hours

• Lay on the grass staring at the sun and the clouds and the blue expanse of sky and the tops of trees

• Allow the ground to hold you 

• Let go completely of all the holding-it-togetherness you have been clinging so tightly to for so long

• Allow yourself to Cry

• Cry