How hard is it to just let it be? Whatever it is. Maybe it is a feeling or situation. Or a person or myself. The thinking mind can make the unknown scary. It can put a story on what is happening that is much smaller than what is actually happening. Labeling and categorizing people and feelings is a way to feel safe but often it does not even come close to what is actually real. Letting it be seems to be the way for me to let whatever it is move..let it go, which is not the thinking mind's strong suit.

John O'Donohue, my great teacher now on the Other Side, gives us these words to help us let the unknown be. This poem, Nowhere, is from his book Echoes of Memory.

Nowhere
They are to be admired those survivors
of solitude who have gone with no maps
into the room without features,
where no wilderness awaits a footstep trace,
no path of dance to a cold summit
to look back on and feel exuberant,
no clarity of territories yet untounched
that tremble near the human breath,
no thickets of undergrowth with deep pores
to nest the litanies of wind addicted birds,
no friendship of other explorers
drawn into the dawn of the unknown.

No. They do not belong to the outside worship
of the earth, but risk themselves in the interior
space where the senses have nothing to celebrate,
where the air intensifies the intrusion of the human
and a poultice of silence pulls every sound
out of a circulation down into the ground,
where in the panic of being each breath unravels
an ever deeper strand in the web of weaving mind,
shawls of though fall off, empty and lost,
where the only red scream of blood continues unheard
within anonymous skin, and the end of all exploring
is the relentless arrival at an ever novel nowhere.