Value for Friday of Week 12 in the season of Sowing

Arriving – Leaving; Stimulating – Letting Alone; Holding On – Letting Go

The emerging springtime reminds us that all things have their season: a time to arrive and a time to leave; times to hold on and times to let go; times to act on and times to let alone.

Love is why I came here in the first place.
Love is now the reason I must go.
[John Denver, “Seasons of the Heart“]

Arriving and Leaving: People enter and leave our lives: sometimes by their choice, sometimes by ours, often by circumstance. The arrival and departure of people who are significant to us is an important kind of beginning and ending.

Holding On and Letting Go: There are times for holding on. The child is not born ready to leave home. The parent may be too young and healthy to die. The young man who does not go after the young woman who has just walked away in anger may regret it for the remainder of his life.

There are times for letting go. The child reaches a point at which he not only can go but should go. The parent’s time to die comes. Some people make better friends than lovers.

Our narratives are full of stories of holding on and especially letting go. Few things touch the heart more poignantly.

Stimulating and Letting Alone: Most of us have a lazy streak and can use some encouragement from time to time. Practically all of us have times when we seem to have to jump-start ourselves.

However, there are times when people are best left alone. The ability to know the difference is an important attribute, one that can save a relationship.

Real

True Narratives

Before dawn they came to take me back to my den. I drew aside the window curtain, to take a last look of my child. The moonlight shone on her face, and I bent over her, as I had done years before, that wretched night when I ran away. I hugged her close to my throbbing heart; and tears, too sad for such young eyes to shed, flowed down her cheeks, as she gave her last kiss, and whispered in my ear, "Mother, I will never tell." And she never did.

When I got back to my den, I threw myself on the bed and wept there alone in the darkness. It seemed as if my heart would burst. When the time for Ellen's departure drew nigh, I could hear neighbors and friends saying to her, "Good by, Ellen. I hope your poor mother will find you out. Won't you be glad to see her!" She replied, "Yes, ma'am;" and they little dreamed of the weighty secret that weighed down her young heart. She was an affectionate child, but naturally very reserved, except with those she loved, and I felt secure that my secret would be safe with her. I heard the gate close after her, with such feelings as only a slave mother can experience. [Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Chapter XXVII, New Distination for the Children.]

 

Other narratives:

On letting go of the past, and not:

Technical and Analytical Readings

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

Poor old Jean Valjean certainly did not love Cosette otherwise than as a father; but we have already remarked, above, that into this paternity the widowhood of his life had introduced all the shades of love; he loved Cosette as his daughter, and he loved her as his mother, and he loved her as his sister; and, as he had never had either a woman to love or a wife, as nature is a creditor who accepts no protest, that sentiment also, the most impossible to lose, was mingled with the rest, vague, ignorant, pure with the purity of blindness, unconscious, celestial, angelic, divine; less like a sentiment than like an instinct, less like an instinct than like an imperceptible and invisible but real attraction; and love, properly speaking, was, in his immense tenderness for Cosette, like the thread of gold in the mountain, concealed and virgin.  Let the reader recall the situation of heart which we have already indicated. No marriage was possible between them; not even that of souls; and yet, it is certain that their destinies were wedded. With the exception of Cosette, that is to say, with the exception of a childhood, Jean Valjean had never, in the whole of his long life, known anything of that which may be loved. The passions and loves which succeed each other had not produced in him those successive green growths, tender green or dark green, which can be seen in foliage which passes through the winter and in men who pass fifty. In short, and we have insisted on it more than once, all this interior fusion, all this whole, of which the sum total was a lofty virtue, ended in rendering Jean Valjean a father to Cosette. A strange father, forged from the grandfather, the son, the brother, and the husband, that existed in Jean Valjean; a father in whom there was included even a mother; a father who loved Cosette and adored her, and who held that child as his light, his home, his family, his country, his paradise.  Thus when he saw that the end had absolutely come, that she was escaping from him, that she was slipping from his hands, that she was gliding from him, like a cloud, like water, when he had before his eyes this crushing proof: "another is the goal of her heart, another is the wish of her life; there is a dearest one, I am no longer anything but her father, I no longer exist"; when he could no longer doubt, when he said to himself: "She is going away from me!" the grief which he felt surpassed the bounds of possibility. To have done all that he had done for the purpose of ending like this! And the very idea of being nothing! Then, as we have just said, a quiver of revolt ran through him from head to foot. He felt, even in the very roots of his hair, the immense reawakening of egotism, and the _I_ in this man's abyss howled. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume IV – Saint-Denis; Book Fifteenth – The Rue de L’Homme Armé, Chapter I, A Drinker Is a Babbler.]

 

The main theme of Colm Tóibín's fiction seems to be regret. Though regret is not our ideal, it is a prominent part of our thoughts and therefore of our story.

Other works on letting go:

Poetry

A spruce tree stands alone
In the Northland on an bald peak
It reposes, shrouded in white
Surrounded by ice and snow.

It dreams of a palm tree
Which in the far away orient,
Mourns in silence and solitude
On the rim of a burning cliff.

[Heinrich Heine, Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam ("A spruce tree stands alone") (1823).]

I loved you, and I probably still do,
And for a while the feeling may remain...
But let my love no longer trouble you,
I do not wish to cause you any pain.
I loved you; and the hopelessness I knew,
The jealousy, the shyness - though in vain -
Made up a love so tender and so true
As may God grant you to be loved again
.

[Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, “I Loved You”]

ARRIVING – LEAVING

Love, we're going home now, / Where the vines clamber over the trellis: / Even before you, the summer will arrive, / On its honeysuckle feet, in your bedroom.
Our nomadic kisses wandered over all the world: / Armenia, dollop of disinterred honey: / Ceylon, green dove: and the YangTse with its old / Old patience, dividing the day from the night.
And now, dearest, we return, across the crackling sea / Like two blind birds to their wall, / To their nest in a distant spring:
Because love cannot always fly without resting, / Our lives return to the wall, to the rocks of the sea: / Our kisses head back home where they belong.

[Pablo Neruda, “Love, We’re Going Home Now”]

Other poems on arriving and leaving:

Poetry books:

HOLDING ON – LETTING GO

I was angry with my friend;  / I told my wrath, my wrath did end. / I was angry with my foe: / I told it not, my wrath did grow. 

And I waterd it in fears, / Night & morning with my tears: / And I sunned it with smiles,

And with soft deceitful wiles. / And it grew both day and night. / Till it bore an apple bright. / And my foe beheld it shine, / And he knew that it was mine. 

And into my garden stole, / When the night had veild the pole; / In the morning glad I see; / My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

[William Blake, “A Poison Tree”]

Other poems on holding on and letting go:

STIMULATING – LETTING ALONE

 

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Compositions:

Music: songs and other short pieces

Arriving:

The number of popular songs that strike this chord attest to how common the pain of leaving is in our culture.

Visual Arts

Film and Stage

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