Letting go and becoming......

Today I dropped my son at his first day of high school; not just high school but an all male high school lead by the monks of Benedictine. A Spiritual place, a society of men.
A foreign world for a woman and mother.
The world of men is a mystery, as it should be.
Allowing him to enter that world without my watchful eye, and allowing him enter the Lodge is a rite of passage and  the hardest  surrender yet.
Although he is my son- he is a man and I will never be able to understand ( as much as I like to think I do) or fill the place that defines him in that way.
So...today I will be the Bow that bends in the Archer's hand- and allow  my son- the arrow to be sent forth in the company of other Warriors...

Children- Kahlil Gibran And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, 'Speak to us of Children.' And he said: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness; For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable. Khalil Gibran