Letting go, like a lullaby still audible from the depths of memory, offers a glimpse of guidance, a kiss of reassurance, and little else. A phrase that has drifted far from the choice and act of letting go. A euphemism at once familiar and foreign. Letting go. As if it were easy. As if it were inconsequential. As if it salved the angst of second guessing. As if thinking it, saying it, and ultimately doing it were the sum total of the journey. But it’s neither easy nor inconsequential. The journey is nonlinear, the destination is vacillating and even evanescent, and the waypoints are seductive and comforting. Letting go, I’m beginning to suspect, is my Holy Grail in this almost-two-decade adventure with Rosslyn.
On September 28, 2023, about eleven months ago, I acknowledged the alluring but elusive quest that had germinated out of my old house journaling.
What *IS* my holy grail in this inquisitive quest through Rosslyn monuments and middens? Where am I going with this adventure? What am I hoping to achieve?
[…]
This Sunday I’ll dive into month number 15 of daily analysis, meditation, introspection, experimentation, curation, hypothesis, and, yes, some belly button gazing too. More than a year of wondering. Wandering. Every day. Asking questions. That lead to more questions. Trying to ascertain why and how Rosslyn, an historic property on the Adirondack Coast of Lake Champlain invited us into a relationship; allowed us to develop alongside her, with her, through her; enveloping us in a passionate, trusting, and transformative home.
423 days endeavoring, essaying, questing, exploring, experimenting,… But *WHAT* am I trying to achieve?
At some level this website, these field notes and meditations, these archives and poems have been an attempt to discern a reason for some of the decisions we’ve made. And an inventory of memorable moments along the way. Perhaps, sometimes even an effort to overlay a logic that may not actually have been evident at the time. I’ve acknowledged more than once that retrospection, the vagaries of subjective memory, the siren call of creative license, and the existential need to find meaning and justification inevitably blur the boundaries of life lived and crafted facsimile. (Source: Holy Grail?)
In other words, I’d set out on a quasi forensic inquiry into our relationship with Rosslyn, but almost a year later the journey has brought me here, to a grappling with letting go of Rosslyn. Is that not then the Holy Grail? And how better to advance this quest than to engage in discourse — verbal and visual, retrospective and introspective, rational and intuitive — with Rosslyn?
Rosslyn Redux is a prolonged correspondence with our home. I’ve understood my inquiry [to be] a sort of epistolary memoir, a not-too-distant cousin to my desktop scattered with stacks of notes, letters, sketches, poems, artifacts,… I understand Rosslyn as an entity. A companion. A being. Not just an inanimate home or property. My daily discourse is most often with her.
[…]
This dialogue with Rosslyn is a bridge between the logical and the intuitive. On the one hand I well accept that this name [Rosslyn] describes a menagerie of historic buildings presiding over 60+ acres of waterfront, gardens, orchards, meadows, and woods. And it’s logical too that Susan and I are calculating an appropriate… [if repeatedly postponed and long overdue consideration of] our relationship with our home.
But braided into this discursive initiative is a less logical, profoundly emotional and psychological relationship with Rosslyn. There’s an intimacy, a passion, a trust, and a powerful and enduring attraction that connects us with Rosslyn.
My holy grail is in no small part grappling with this potent pull. Seeking to understand it. To honor it. And, in due course, to begin untethering… (Source: Holy Grail & Daily Discourse)
This coming Sunday, September 1, 2024, I’ll dive into month number 26 of my old house journaling odyssey, and I do so with a renewed vigor, newfound clarity, and a sense of urgency.
Four days ago I recounted (albeit with still-veiled restraint) yet another degree of clarity, catalyzed by a pre-dawn portrait of Rosslyn’s carriage barn and icehouse framed in brume.
Enrapturing mist, at once spotlighting the tree flanked barns and muting almost everything else… [conveyed a] morning message, mysterious but timely… I tilted my head upward and tried to absorb it all, the mysterious message like a mirage.
Minutes like these bend time. Blur boundaries. Blend sensations with memories and daydreams. Minutes like these — suspended between trees, between daytime and nighttime, between lived fact and read fiction, between vacation and school, vacation and work — invite wondering and wandering. Court questions more than answers. Remind us to linger a little longer, to let go, to yield. (Source: Mist Mingling Prose)
I lingered. I let go. I yielded to the mystery of the early morning mist…
And for a few minutes… looking at the barns — the carriage barn on the left and icehouse on the right — like some sort of apparition, like some sort of memory barely discernible from the blur beyond, I experienced a glimmer of recognition, of familiarity, of confidence, of conviction. And I chuckled.
Perhaps, soon,… the mist will melt away. And then, given a little perspective, I just might find the missing pieces. (Source: Misty Morning)
But first I row my dory out into the middle of Lake Champlain to watch the sun sear through the mysterious mist, rowing toward clarity, dorying toward mist-free confidence and conviction. (Source: Misty Mysterious)
That mid lake meditation, rowing and reflecting on Rosslyn’s barns, sweating, breathing heavily, oar stroke after oar stroke, observing the rising sun vanquishing the misting, burning away the blurry mystery and restoring crisp clarity, that mid lake meditation firmed up the conviction I’d first grasped in the darkness while observing the barns. (I’ll return to this personally important rediscovery about barns soon.)
But let me, for now, return to the question of letting go.
At the outset Susan and I came to Rosslyn envisioning a timeline between 2 and 4 years. Ha! We hadn’t even finished her rehabilitation in four years. As of right now 18 years of life and adventure, nurturing, welcoming, inspiring, and ongoing rehabilitation, separate us from the summer of 2006 when we launched this venture. At the outset we hadn’t considered the possibility that this property might become such an important part of our lives. We couldn’t have imagined that we’d struggle to let her go almost 2 decades later. But both are true.
The driving impetus over the last 2+ years has been different, divorced from simply making sense of our decisions to invent a new chapter for Susan and my recently conjoined (back in 2006) lives. The driving impetus has been in no small part a journey toward letting go. I’ve struggled to define exactly what I’ve been trying to achieve in part because was still not 100% clear. But a big part, maybe the biggest part, has been grappling with letting go. Moving on. Closure. Permission. Catharsis.
So this evening, as I round the corner of twenty five months and prepare to push ahead into my 26th month, I’m prepared to begin redirecting this daily discourse toward the Holy Grail of letting go. May this newfound clarity and conviction carry me forward!
What do you think?