Beckoning

        Excerpt from Beckoning: When Happiness Calls

LETTING GO

 
    It was a sunny summer morning at our B&B on Pender Island in British Columbia.  We had just come up to the main house for breakfast when Penny, our hostess, began shooing everyone onto the deck perched high above the beach.  In her arms was a big bowl full of meat—scraps from last night’s salmon dinner, freezer-burned hamburgers, and less desirable chicken parts like necks and backs.
    “Be still and watch,” she ordered as she flung a hamburger high into the air and out toward the water.  I leaned over the railing and watched it hit the stones far below.  Almost immediately a couple of crows were on it.  “Keep watching,” she said as she side-armed a chicken neck to the left of the burger.  With each throw she called out a shrill series of yelps that echoed across the water.  Down on the beach, the crows’ angry caws were overtaken by deeper raspy croaks, as ravens joined the dispute over how the food would be divvied up.
    "Still not yet…” two more heaves and then she said, “here they come!”  Two pair of bald eagles flew over from a nearby island and quickly asserted their place in the pecking order.  The ravens and crows fled to nearby pine trees where they complained loudly.  As Penny flung a piece of chicken into a high arc, the two male eagles flew to intercept it and collided, wings clashing, screeching their threats at each other, not 20 feet from where we were standing.  This spectacular display of the eagles’ dominance continued until Penny’s bowl was empty.
    As I watched the eagles head back to their nests across the water, Penny said, “They look pretty fierce but they don’t always win.”  She wiped her hands on her apron.  “Every now and then we find one drowned.”  She went on to explain that, once in awhile, an eagle misjudges and sinks its talons into the back of a salmon that is too heavy to lift.  Because the muscles that control an eagle’s talons freeze when activated, the eagle can’t let go for several minutes, until it is too late, and the strong fish pulls it below the surface.
    The image of the eagle, with its talons locked in the salmon, comes to mind when I realize that I’ve been hanging onto something too long.  When I stayed in a job that I hated, because the pay was too good to give up.  When I hung onto a friendship that drained me, or a relationship that wasn’t working, for fear of being alone.   These things that we hang onto (mostly out of fear of letting go) drag us down and drain our energy.
    Sometimes it is very difficult to let go, because the things we hang onto represent something else—prestige or desirability, for example.  They are symbols of how we view ourselves from the outside. 
    The eagle can’t open her talons once they are locked into prey, but if she could let go, she would beat the water from her wings and rise to hunt another time, for her instinct tells her that there are always other fish.
    What things, people, or habits are dragging you down and draining your energy?  What would it feel like to let go of them?