Around the beginning of September, the beautiful mountains near me were on fire. The Bobcat Wildfire, one of many in California, brought smokey air and snow-like ash to my community, and as I write this post, the wildfire has burned almost 180 square miles and is still only 84 percent contained. Though the fire has moved away from my town and the evacuation warning was lifted a few weeks ago, I remember the unease I felt, getting up in the morning to darkened, dystopian skies, having to stay inside because of the smoke, and packing a “go” bag in the event we had to evacuate with minutes’ notice. One could begin to think, “What else is going to happen?”

As I wrestled with yet another layer of uncertainty, I turned to my favorite poet, Mary Oliver, and her poem “In Blackwater Woods.” She writes of a fire in that woods and how “the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light.” Oliver offers wisdom about what we need to know about living with uncertainty:

To live in this world

You must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the times comes to let it go,

to let it go.

Oliver’s words talk about what we would just as soon forget: the impermanence of life. We are not powerless, though. We are to love what we know will change and pass away, and we are learning, through these turbulent times, how to let go of what is familiar and comfortable. It can seem as if “your own life depends on it,” but letting go can become a teacher of sorts. Milarepa, a twelfth-century Tibetan Buddhist master, supposedly said, “The precious pot containing my riches becomes my teacher in the very moment it breaks.” Our “precious pot,” the world as we knew it, has broken, and whether it is COVID-19, social injustice and unrest, turbulent political discourse, or wildfires, we are being taught how to let go.

Photo courtesy of Wendy Ledbetter