Heartbreak, unemployment, fire, and now embarking on another open-ended journey (I’m on the way to the airport as I write this draft). If this year has a theme for me, it’s definitely “letting go”.

It’s hard to let go. I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard that newly born babies have such strength in their hands that they can grab something and hold their weight. So it seems that we’re born with the ability to grab and hold on. And then we spend the rest of our lives learning to let go, until our moment of death when we finally let go of life itself.

What makes letting go particularly difficult for me, at times, is the fact that I’m a pretty tenacious guy. In many situations, that’s a virtue. If there’s something I want to accomplish, or a problem that needs to be solved, I’ll keep at it until I succeed. This trait has gotten me pretty far in life, and it’s something I’m proud of. But, sometimes, our gifts can also be vices, when applied in the wrong context. Sometimes, I need to make the difficult decision to let go, rather than to endlessly attempt to solve an intractable problem.

One tool I’ve come to appreciate in such difficult processes, is a ritual of some sort. I haven’t always been a big fan of rituals, having been exposed to quite a few of them through my Japanese heritage. The inexplicably rigid format of old rituals felt mechanistic, and I didn’t understand their underlying purposes or intentions. But, as I grow older, I’ve come to appreciate rituals for what they are: a way to externalize, visualize, embody, or make tangible an internal and invisible process, often in the presence of witnesses.

One ritual I enjoy and actively take part in, is the act of burning, which I experience annually at the Burning Man festival where a giant man-shaped effigy, a large temple, and other large pieces of art are burned every year in the vast emptiness of the Black Rock desert in Nevada. One of the wonderful things about burning is that it can symbolize and represent almost anything you want. To burn something, you need to create something to be burnt, which in itself can be a satisfying and meaningful endeavor. And when you light up a giant (non-destructive) fire, it almost always evokes a sense of wonder and beauty, and a sense of celebration. Or, burning an effigy can represent conquest, victory or at least resistance and rebellion. And burning something of value can symbolize a form of release and catharsis.

So, when I recently made the difficult decision to finally let go of a really amazing lady I madly fell in love with last winter and clung to for way too long after our attempted relationship fell apart, I decided to build something and burn it. After some thought, I felt it would be fitting to build a log cabin-shaped pyre to represent the hopes and dreams I had for a future with her, and then to burn it down to express my commitment to letting go. I told a few neighbors about this plan, who eagerly joined in on the project, and we spent an afternoon collecting fallen trees and felling skinny struggling trees from my pine forest. That process served the triple purpose of supplying building materials/fuel for our project, removing fuels from my woods to reduce the impact of a potential fire, and culling stragglers to give stronger trees more room to grow. Incorporating local sustainable materials and employing forest stewardship practices seemed only fitting considering how our shared love of nature and passion for environmentalism were partially what had brought she and I together. Once we’d collected a large pile of logs, we proceeded to stack them into a vaguely cabin-like shape, then filled it with dry tinder.

After the build, we broke for dinner. As we prepared dinner and waited for dusk to fall, nature gave a helping hand by blessing us with just enough rain to dampen the ground and eliminate our concerns of an un-contained fire. Then the sky cleared, the sun set, the stars appeared in a moonless sky. We trudged back up the hill in darkness, the chilly air moist with the smells of early autumn. We stood by our cabin-pyre, I said a few words, then lit it up. As the fire roared, shooting flames high into the sky, scattering embers among the stars, I let the heat and the light sear into my skin and mind…

So, am I done? No. But the burn gave me a sense of finality. And every time my mind wanders back to her, the things I said or didn’t say, or the adventures we never went on, I remind myself: Let it go. You burned that cabin, remember?