Guest post: On Letting Go

And also, the wisdom (or folly) of buying white pants

Scroll to the bottom for: Katherine’s UK (Margate) and US (Chautauqua) speaking dates

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When Katherine May slides into your DMs and asks you to write a guest post for The Clearing, you say yes. There really is no other option. You say yes even though you haven’t the faintest idea what you’d like to write about. 

What should the guest post discuss? you ask, and when she responds with Anything you want!, something inside of you unclenches instantly. 

Anything, you think, and for a moment you relax into something soft and vast. Anything I want! But then that something inside of you clenches all over again. 

Anything? But where do you possibly get started with that?

*

I am not, by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, an expert on space. I’m like an amateur’s amateur—someone who likes looking up at the sky and feeling small, someone who finds power in the not-knowing. I’ve never taken a physics class and I can feel my brain start to shut down as soon as calculations come into the fray. I think there are as many things to be learned from the stories and myths we’ve told about the stars as there are about the things we can learn from the instruments we’ve sent out into the cosmos. I live in an impossible place—the place where stars can be balls of hydrogen gas and also gods, where a black hole can be the end of spacetime as we know it and also a portal to something else, some reality we haven’t yet discovered. 

It's also, as it happens, a place where you can lose your best friend to cancer and find yourself spewed out into a swirl of grief, the star that you once knew as friendship suddenly exploded and gone, nothing left of it but gas and interstellar detritus. Something brilliant and beautiful and life-giving, now only wisps of cloud against the black of the cosmos. 

Illustration by Paper Trident

How do you move forward in a world like this if not for magic? 

*

In September of 2023 I took a plane from Edinburgh to Cologne and then boarded a train into the hills. My destination was the village of Waldbröl and the European Institute of Applied Buddhism. I was in the midst of a two-month research trip to Scotland. I’d taken a year’s leave from work in order to draft a new book about grief, and had returned to the seaside town where my best friend Jess and I had met as postgraduate students in 2007 as part of this work of grief writing. In the years since her death in 2019 from cancer, I had found a great deal of solace in Buddhism and the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, and a weekend mindfulness retreat in Germany was exactly, I felt, what I needed to get this book of mine going. I was going to spend a weekend meditating and walking through the woods and eating wholesome vegan food and by the end of it I’d be so integrated and whole I’d practically be levitating above my meditation mat. I celebrated by buying myself a pair of pristine white meditation pants (meditation trousers, for all my UK friends) in preparation.

The pants will make me be mindful, I thought. I’ll have to work extra hard to keep from spilling anything on them.

The train took me to Hennef Bahnhof, where I disembarked and then promptly boarded the wrong bus, which took me in the exact opposite direction I needed to go. After some time spent staring at Google Maps as the little blue dot of our bus advanced farther from my destination, I got off the bus and wandered aimlessly in a small German village looking for a taxi. My phone battery was dying and I worried about not being able to pay my taxi fare as I hadn’t taken cash out at the airport. 

So convenient! I’d thought, days before, when looking at all of my transit options in preparation for the trip. Now I can do everything via phone apps and don’t have to worry about taking out cash. It is less convenient when you’re lost, and cashless, and your phone is in danger of dying.  

“We do not have business cards,” said the sweet, bemused teen working the convenience store counter when I went in to ask about taxis. Business cards? I imagined him thinking. What is this—1996? “You can…just Google a taxi service?”

I tried to call a taxi service but couldn’t get past the language barrier. Eventually I went back to where I’d been dropped off, took the next bus back to the train station, and made the journey all over again, this time in the right direction. 

I arrived late to the retreat—so late, in fact, that the monk who welcomed me told me to just make my way to my room and rest, as the evening’s meditation activities had already begun. I trundled my suitcase out to the dormitory and lugged it up two flights of stairs only to discover that I’d been given the wrong room, as someone else’s belongings were already on the bed. So I pulled my suitcase back down the stairs and out to the main hall, got the correct room number, walked back to the dormitory, climbed back up the stairs, let myself into my room, and collapsed on the bed. It was cool and lovely and outside of my window I could hear the soft hooting of owls and the wind through the trees. 

Despite this, I did not sleep at all that night. Instead I laid on my small mattress, keyed up and anxious, angry at myself for arriving late and getting angrier by the moment at my stubborn refusal to rest, to let go, to fall asleep, to just be. 

By the morning that anger and frustration had coalesced into unmistakable period cramps and gastro-intestinal distress that sent me running to the bathroom. I wanted to curl on my mattress and sleep for days. But I had come all this way; there was nothing to do except ride it out. When the morning bell rang, I pulled on my flowing white pants and said a small prayer—that I would be all right, yes, but mostly that my pants would be okay—and made my way to meditation. 

*

Grief, I am finding, is a lot like lying curled up on your bed, doubled over with cramps and being unable to sleep. It is a lot like making plans and preparing and then watching from the sidelines as all your plans go to hell. You can learn to be still and rest in the moment and still things will come to knock you sideways. Still, the universe in all its wisdom will look at you, tentatively making your way back to joy after so many years of awful, and say: but wait, there’s more.

Stargazing is a lot like this too. We only have so much control over the weather, which is to say mostly none at all. You can set yourself up for a night of watching the Perseids and find the sky obstructed by clouds; you can, as so many people in North America did earlier this year, travel into the path of the solar eclipse only to find your best intentions marred by the same thing. There is a chasm that waits between expectation and observation and sometimes you don’t see it until you’re right there at the edge. 

After Jess died I found myself fascinated by the stars because contemplating the universe and contemplating the vastness of grief felt like the same thing. If I try to understand the universe, I thought, maybe I can make sense of grief too. But this, too, has turned out to be an expectation I can’t really meet. The immense nature of grief does feel balanced by the immense nature of the cosmos, but inhabiting this balance and understanding are not the same thing at all. 

Sometimes, all we can do is be small under the sky. There is no understanding to be had. 

*

I wanted that weekend retreat to feel big to me, but instead it was small in a hundred tiny ways. The smallness of walking to the meditation hall alone at five-thirty in the morning. The soft, barely there hush as we slid off our slippers and crept into the hall. The small, slender candles that filled the hall with the scent of beeswax. Silent dinners where instead we traded tiny smiles across the table. An hour every day spent pulling weeds from small cracks in the pavement. 

Small trips to the bathroom again and again. Discomfort and pain and also a growing sense that even the pain—perhaps especially that—could teach me things. At night, small walks from the dining hall to my dormitory and back, looking up at the stars and thinking about how tiny we all are, and at the same time, how enormous. How we can mean almost nothing on the scale of the universe and also almost everything on the scale of who we are to one another. (Which is to say, on the scale of the universe too, because we’re all a part of the cosmos when you get right down to it. Star-stuff in our bones and teeth.)

My sleep did not really get any better and the gastro stuff did not go away. When the retreat ended and I boarded that bus back to Hennef, I didn’t feel peaceful so much as hollowed out and quiet—another small thing in place of whatever larger transformation I’d been hoping for. I was grateful I had come, yes, but I was also exhausted and in pain. Instead of levitating over my meditation mat I felt like I’d sunk even deeper into sadness, into feeling impossibly small in the face of all that was insurmountable about my grief and also the world’s. 

Letting go of expectation, it turns out, is often some of the hardest letting go to do. 

*

Astronomy, in many ways, is all about the study of light. Astronomers measure the way that light interacts in environments they build here on Earth, and once they’ve established some rules—like the speed of light, or the way that the wavelength of light shifts over great distances—they can extrapolate from this data to make predictions about what light is doing—how it affects and is affected by the gasses and gravity and dark matter—in all of that great cosmic space around us. 

It is science, yes. This is indisputable. But it is also a kind of magic to me, in the sense that all of our knowledge about space is a cumulation of so many centuries of people looking up into the sky, feeling small, and trying to understand. Grief is like this too. All of the stories we tell, all of the small, unremarkable moments and actions that add up to something as we try to understand the landscape of loss. All of the pain that hollows you out so that other things can come in when you’re ready for it. 

It's easy enough now to look back on my time at the retreat these months later and see exactly how it was all destined to fall apart. You cannot plan for sudden illness just as you cannot plan for rapid changes in the weather. At best you can anticipate these things, but you still have to go through them. 

But it’s also true that the more distance I have from that weekend retreat, the more I am able to see how many gifts were waiting for me precisely because of my scuppered expectations. Letting those hopes evaporate into the wind taught me a lot. It showed me that we can be held by many small things even without realizing it: that a bemused teenage clerk can be a bright spot of levity in a long slog of a day; that sometimes just existing with pain and fatigue is its own kind of lesson. (It also showed me that the purchase of white pants is its own kind of gamble with the universe, and sometimes those gambles—as mine did!—turn out okay.) Sometimes the transformations that we long for do not come in big splashy moments of enlightenment but instead trickle down to us through delays and frustrations that come to us over and over until we hear the message they’ve come to impart. Let go. Let go. Let go. 

It took a while for me to grasp this. On a cosmic scale, it took no time at all. Life with grief is like this: at once interminable and also zipping along at the speed of light, unbearable and also astonishing. Small and indescribably vast. I inhabit this space; I very rarely understand it. 

It is enough, I’ve discovered, just to be here.  

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Katherine’s next live appearances:

UK: Monday 15th July: Margate Book Shop with Dan Richards for his Climbing Days tour

USA: Friday 9th August: Chautauqua Institution, NY, speaking as part of the Interfaith Lecture Series. Details here.

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