Let Go: Just Untie the Ribbons

(3-minute read)

Not everyone sees an angel in this image (unedited). But I did, and that was all that mattered.

Moonrise came filtering through my bedroom curtains. I had been awakened, disturbed by a dream or perhaps by the call of a mourning dove.

I made my way through the house to the outside porch. Was I dreaming still? I seemed to see an angel up there in the sky.

Even though it was eerily quiet, I wasn’t afraid at all. Looking out across the valley, I marveled in a new way.

A dove in my bedroom window.

The night before, I’d been doodling while listening to an audio book. I made a sketch of faces. Ribbons kept them together. Red and blue ribbons. I didn’t know what any of it meant.

When I woke, I realized I had drawn me in all my roles within my family. I was the youngest child, but here I held both a blue ribbon and a red ribbon.

The blue ribbon stood for loyalty, the red, for my passion to be unique and to explore the world.

The drawing pointed back to a simple promise I’d made to my mother. “I will be a caretaker and make sure the family stays together.”

The promise had chained me to a life of brooding over the family like a mother hen.

I was too young to know better. Such a commitment would (and did) keep me from taking care of myself.

When I saw the moonlight and went to it, then snapped the picture of the sky, it was the lump in my chest that made me realize this was no “grab a photo of this cool image” moment.

Because the lump felt a lot like tears of letting go, of realizing that I was being watched over by an angel.

They were tears of gratitude that I still had much of my life to live in a wiser way. And though ghosts haunted the old me, I could choose to be free.

So with the moon as a witness, I gave up a promise that was never in my power to make. I replaced it with a list of the things I have the power to protect, and which I am grateful for: my health, my spirit, my mental space, my beloved friends.

Scribbling turned into a drawing before bedtime. The result was a dream about my family, and ribbons strangling me.

Read a ghost story here: The Thousand Steps (Recollection No. 103)