The Art of Endings, with Grace
Cradling Wounds, Processing Forgiveness, Brokering Reconciliation, Saying Goodbye and Walking Away.
At the time of writing this, we are approaching the Solstice; Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere where I live in Western Australia, and Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, this moment where the Sun seems to stand still.
I am facing the ending of a cycle. We are facing the end of a cycle.
Solstice comes from two latin words ‘Sol’ and ‘Sistere’, which means the Sun Standing Still.
As a people this is how we used to reckon the actual ending or beginning of our year. I have been exploring this idea of looking back to see forward. Some of us are called towards a Tomorrow, towards a new beginning, where we do not know yet, how to be. It is like a new season of our lives, a new territory we have entered without a map, and without language large enough to hold that conversation. But somehow, we know that to greet Tomorrow fully, we need to do so standing naked of the past.
I discovered on entering this threshold myself, that there are several separate projects which need to be done, each with grace. They are a letting go, a sitting with our wounds and a releasing of the tightness and the familiarity with which we have been holding the Conversation. A letting go even of the stance we held towards the world.
But to do so, we know intuitively, we cannot do that without the balancing of a kind of karmic ledger that sits between ourselves and our key relationships. When we take the time to cradle our wounds and become intimate again with our vulnerability, we remember the people that loved us into being, the people that claimed us in their own way, that rejected us, that hurt us in our most vulnerable places.
We imagine mistakenly that our key relationships, friends, family, loved ones, children even, are there as containers that will love us the way we wish to be loved and never break our hearts. We discover that our key relationships are designed to do precisely that. This can even be our relationship with an identity, a passion project or a career.
There is suspicion I have, that If you are on a true path to meet your purpose, your work will both break your heart and welcome you home, and what is more, both are essential to a human life. (See article The Beautiful Paradox of Purpose Pursued.)
If you are on a true path to meet your purpose, your work will both break your heart and welcome you home, and what is more, both are essential to a human life.
So much of our vitality and our sense of hope about life is tied up in the investments we made in those relationships. Towards the ending of a cycle, as we seek passage forward, it becomes apparent that we need to meet the future naked of the past, we need to process closure and clear the ledger.
This article, covers three nights during which sleep could not find me, and I used that time to Process Forgiveness, Broker Reconciliation and Say Goodbye.
Importantly, these three pieces are not simply poetry, they are personal and private ceremonies. So often before we do the forgiving or the reconciling or saying goodbye to someone in the visible outward sense, there is the first place we do it, privately, in the crucible of our own hearts, where we first square the ledger.
Night 1, Processing Forgiveness
When there has been a distance of regret and wounding, we cannot always close that distance, but we can make the way open again between us and especially for ourselves. Forgiveness is less about someone else that it is about us, and yet paradoxically, we arrive at forgiveness only when we hold the same wish for the other person to also be made again both whole and free, do we find a way for ourselves to be both whole and free.
If I cannot love and forgive others for the wounds they gave me, I have missed the lesson of the wound. If I cannot love and forgive myself, for the wounds I gave others, I have missed the lessons of love and forgiveness.
To to truly understand Forgiveness, is not the courageous readiness to forgive at last; it is a stubborn unwillingness to blame in the first place.
There is a piece I wrote in one unbroken stream one night, in a series of nights where I could not sleep. I intuited that I was passing through some ending and energetically I found the honesty in myself to acknowledge that I held some psychological baggage between myself and some one who had wounded me deeply; Someone whom had never arrived at any level of grace and compassion towards me. This person, who had had struggled with their own wounding from the way we had parted. I also knew, with a grace, it was someone from whom I was never to obtain closure.
I realised that if I wanted to be free, I needed to allow them to be free. I realised that if I wanted to pursue the project of Soul Retrieval, I would have to face not only the cost of the lost investment, but also the places I had been unwilling to look: The music we shared, the humour we shared, the things about the world and about ourselves we used to value, that we had chosen to cauterise inside ourselves and shut out from the world. We all know the pangs we feel in our hearts hearing a song, or seeing the opportunity for the candle of humour to be lit, that we used to share with that one person. It is such a shame to cauterise those stems of joy and even grief, because we are too small to make the way open again, even if only privately in our own hearts, between ourselves and the people who broke our hearts and took our promises from us.
Rejection stings, because without realising it, subconsciously we know that rejection is a weighing in the scales, on one side our value and on the other side their discomfort, and knowing that our value does not outweigh their discomfort. Sometimes we had to reject someone else and they never get over that sting. We do not always realise that it is not necessarily a comment about our value, sometimes it is simply that their discomfort grew and was not something they could sit with.
This is the piece I wrote, and I sat with, and which I have given to dozens of loved ones and clients to do their own sacred work of Forgiving:
A PRAYER FOR LETTING GO Loss is a necessary part of change, change a necessary part of growth. The secret aim of all tension is transformation. I release you, so that you may release me. The place that I take in your heart, the way you speak to yourself in my voice, and conjure my face, let it be now only the part of me that you knew to be good, that may serve to guide you home towards your truth. By this; I make the way clear again between us, and allow the bonds and chains that we felt as wounds, to be loosened, so that we may connect again with that in the world which we loved in our hearts about each other. By this, I make the way clear again for me, to connect again with that about Life which I loved in my heart about myself. I release you, so that you may release me. That we may put down the weight that we carried from our time together and our parting; and have washed clean at last, the lingering taste of the way we parted, and acknowledgement of the scars that we held, each in our own manner and measure of reckoning more by the lessons they describe than the manner or measure of wounding. I release you, so that you may release me. That we may be left to carry only that part of our song, which knew only how to love and be loved, something that may yet grow into a feint hymn of fondness and appreciation that is overheard being sung, unbidden in the garden of our hearts by a bird whose name we never learn. Here at the end of this cycle there is nothing left to forgive. I let it go, so that I may belong, fully, to the next cycle, and leave all that is small in me, behind me and take all my inheritance with me. I honour the one that walked the road, that bore the chains, that gave and received the wounds, I carry your essence with me, in the form of Understanding. I am free. I wish you to be free also, and by that I am made free. I am whole. I wish you to be whole also, and by that I am made whole. © Rocco Jarman, March 2023
This is the podcast episode where I covered this piece and my thoughts around the project of Forgiveness:
The second night, I was awake again, and I realised that there were some relationships that I was not ready to let go of, not without one more effort. There was one particular relationship that was very dear to me, and I had seen a greatness in someone, despite them not being able to show up that way. I knew I wanted to have a level of conversation with this person, I wanted very sincerely to Deepen the Conversation, but I also wanted to do it in such a way that honoured the seasonality of my own life, my own place of growth and the new way in which I was able to love myself and hold boundaries.
Night 2, Brokering Reconciliation
There are some relationships which suffer a wounding or a distance, and we are not ready to let go of those relationships yet. But by the same token we have entered into a deeper and more wholesome relationship with ourselves, and we are unwilling to abandon our boundaries or compromise our standards. And even though reconciliation has to be a two-way street, we can still be the ones that show the leadership and the courage to initiate the Invitation, to the deeper conversation.
“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.” Prentis Hemphill
We never get taught the art of brokering reconciliation, this delicate process of inviting someone to show up as their whole self, while asking due courtesy of them to make room for how we wish to show up, and the level of compromise we need to negotiate. The compromise cannot be to our standards that we hold for ourselves, but we learn through this, that some of the ideas we have, have room for nuance and movement. We can actually learn a lot about ourselves and how we want to be loved and regarded, by our thoughtful courage and willingness to negotiate reconciliation.
There is however no guarantee that the other person is ready for that deeper conversation, because they may have not found a way to sit with their own work. Our wounding in these relationships are always from ignorance and an inability for us to sit with our own wounds and process our own shit. So often, when someone wounds us, what they are in fact actually doing is merely bumping up against an earlier wound which we never had the presence of mind to deal with. But we do want to know that in that invitation to open a door between you, they have learned something, and that have grown and can see you more clearly in your growth.
To reconcile, it is not an apology we want, it is simply the acknowledgement that what was done, was done in ignorance, and that something has since been learned, enough to understand that it cannot go the same way again.
Not one of us arrive here without mistakes and regret. Forgiveness is one part, which is about freeing ourselves. Reconciliation is another matter, forgiveness can be given without closure, without redress, without any deserving, and we are always made greater by doing it.
We never get taught the art of reconciliation. It is an art, and its canvas and easel are acknowledgement of the human experience of the other, and an acceptance of the necessary relationship between boundaries and healing, and of the appreciation of relative perspective. So we can put down our vigilance.
Otherwise it is an unsigned and uneasy truce waiting for the next provocation, which can be nothing more than an accidental unintended sleight.
MY FRIEND
My friend.
I do not ask you for forgiveness,
nor for an apology.
In that currency,
let there be no fare
between us.
I do not want for forgiveness,
for I must forgive myself.
Do not ask me for forgiveness;
it was our great mistake
to believe it is another’s to give.
I will tell you what it is that I want,
what my heart truly desires,
it is reconciliation;
between me and the all,
and also between all things with each Other.
And I see fit to begin here,
between you and I.
To be reconciled,
we would earn and give the blessing
of being seen more fully
and thereby understood.
Being that it always was
ever and only ignorance
and pain
that lead us to the first wounding
and the first spite.
And I would know
that you are no longer ignorant,
because I feel that I am not.
I have learned firstly
that we are not always right,
and that even when we are,
we are not always kind.
And secondly,
that good walls make good neighbors,
but the boundary needs careful mending
from both sides.
And I would make a stile
between your fields
and mine
and with you,
share its keep.
And I would know,
that you, by grace,
learned how to hold the pain
you were given to carry,
or perhaps
how to let it go.
Because i know that I have.
And most of all,
there are treasures and keys
and secrets and rare signs
and gems of humour
that of all the people on this wide earth,
I can only share with you.
© Rocco Jarman, March 2023
This is the podcast episode where I covered this piece and my thoughts around the project of Brokering Reconciliation:
I had the conversation with that person, and although I failed in my wish to broker a new season for our relationship, it was enough for my soul that the effort had been made, in the right way, from the right place in my heart. Not everyone is ready for the Conversation, and somehow, this brought the necessary closure.
Night 3, Saying Goodbye
Sometimes there are relationships which we cannot invite into a new season, and there are people who think they are willing, but are ultimately not ready to have the necessary conversation.
As we grow, we learn to hold better boundaries for ourselves and we discover that self-love is really about the standards we hold ourselves to and we hold for ourselves. Some people cannot understand that when we say ‘no’ to them, we are showing self-love, because that is not something they are capable of. Sometimes we need to embrace the challenging reality that people we love are not open to growth or the level of self-honesty we need for connection and security. Sometimes reconciliation fails when the other person is not ready to have that level of conversation or that level of self-ownership.
Sometimes we have to choose ourselves.
I had to face this when I realised there were a couple of people who I loved very deeply, but who I could not have relationships with and show up as my true self because they were too small and too weak in themselves, and too conditioned to the idea of victimhood to allow conviction in someone else. Any shared space and time would require a level of restraint and holding them in their preciousness and their narrative, which would place an enormous amount of responsibility on me to hold space and never trigger them. This is something we are sometimes prepared to do, with our children, but when our lives also include other vulnerabilities, we need to hold boundaries for, we need to hold those boundaries even against these people, for whom the holding of a boundary is perceived as an attack. When this happens, all shared space and time can only ever result in more wounding and more unrequited effort on our part.
There is still a way to process this with grace and compassion, as much for yourself as it is for them. We cannot please our way to happiness, and we cannot hold space for the weakness in others forever without incurring a cost to our own projects of growth.
Sometimes we have to choose ourselves.
GOODBYE, I CANNOT LOVE YOU
Goodbye,
I cannot love you,
because you never were a friend to me.
Goodbye,
I cannot keep you,
because you were unsafe to yourself.
Goodbye,
I cannot care for you,
because I cannot love you
the way that you expect me to love.
I can only love the way
that is true in my heart,
and for all the light
I can wish into these eyes,
I cannot see how you are true in yours.
Goodbye,
I cannot hold for you,
Because you are weak in the places
where I choose to be defenceless.
Goodbye,
I cannot trust you,
because you are so reliable,
to be the same as this,
on any day,
when the wind stops blowing your way.
So reliable, to raise the flags of victimhood
when we should be taking turns,
adjusting the sails,
adjusting our course,
and toiling at the oars.
Goodbye.
I cannot love you, because.
Because you don’t care for my ’because’,
and yours has taken up all the room
in our shared harbour.
© Rocco Jarman, March 2023
At the time of writing this, the episode about Saying Goodbye and Walking Away had not been released yet.
I hope this brings you the level of closure and possibility for moving forward as it has for me. I encourage you to sit with these pieces, to take time, to honour the ending of your cycle, to find the courage to greet your future standing naked of your past, leaving everything that is small in you on the threshold and taking the whole of your inheritance with you, through the door.
With Love,
Rocco
I can't process all this in one sitting as you suggest! But this line really hit me in relationship to a friend I had to say goodbye to:
"Goodbye.
I cannot love you, because.
Because you don’t care for my ’because’,
and yours has taken up all the room
in our shared harbour."