“You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.” – Pema Chödrön
A warm, tranquil summer day can shift in moments.
The horizon births a thunderhead, dark and swollen with rain. Light fades across the summer sky, as if a great hand slowly dims the world. Thunder mutters from beyond the hills—a voice still distant but growing. Lifeguards wave swimmers to shore. Beach towels snap shut. Sandals slap against bare heels. People scatter across hot sand like startled birds, eyes lifted to the darkening skies.
Wind stirs the leaves. Rain arrives tentatively at first—a staccato question against skin and leaf—then answers itself with sudden conviction as the cloudburst claims its territory. Summer storms here often pour two inches of rain in less than an hour, turning earth to soup and air to water.
As the storm settles overhead, lightning tears through the cloud-darkness. For one breath-stopping instant, a jagged crack burns the air at temperatures five times hotter than the sun’s surface—ordinary summer warmth transformed to 54,000 degrees in a heartbeat. The air itself explodes. Thunder follows, a physical force shuddering through chest and bone, rattling dishes behind cabinet doors, sending dogs to dark corners, their eyes wide with animal knowing.
Wind loses all direction. It pushes east, then west, surges north, then south—sometimes plunging straight down like a great palm flattening grass. A tornado threatens. Trees bow and thrash as if in pain. Branches surrender with sharp cracks. Water transforms the landscape—driveways become streams, puddles swell into ponds, creeks forget their patient boundaries. Power lines yield with blue-white flashes.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the rain softens. Wind settles to a whisper. The thunderhead drifts onward, leaving only puddles that mirror the clearing sky.
It was during such a storm that I lost something precious. Not merely damaged or misplaced—it lifted from the earth and vanished completely, carried away to some unknown place, never to return.
When I first traveled to Alaska with dreams of adventure and commercial fishing, I arrived in Anchorage with only a few hundred dollars. After planning my route, I realized my only option was to hitchhike to Homer, where fishing boats might need crew. If that failed, I could work in the cannery to earn money for the ferry to Kodiak, home to one of America’s largest fishing fleets.
Homer lies as far from Anchorage as Washington, D.C. is from New York. But in 1989, instead of highways and roadside motels, there was mostly wilderness. I knew I’d need shelter for the journey and for time spent in the notoriously rain-soaked coastal towns before I found work. So I spent precious dollars at an outfitter’s store on the best tent I could find for under fifty dollars.
That small, surprisingly tough tent became my home—during the hitchhiking journey, two weeks living on Homer’s rocky spit while working cannery shifts, and the week I spent in mossy woods outside Kodiak as I walked the docks seeking work.
When I returned from my time at sea, my little tent came too. Though often folded away in garage or basement corners, it always stood ready for the next adventure. It provided dry shelter during backpacking trips on sandy barrier islands, forest hikes, and gatherings with friends beneath open skies. Never once did it leak or need repair.
The deeper adventure came with fatherhood.
My rugged tent found new purpose pitched in the side yard or living room, filled with soft blankets pressed to its walls and stuffed animals scattered like friendly sentinels—the perfect napping fort. As my daughter drifted to sleep in my arms, I’d gaze at those familiar walls and ceiling, remembering wilder but less treasured days.
When my youngest child—my first son—arrived, he seemed born ready for adventure. Too small for real backpacking, we had countless backyard campouts instead. We’d raise the tent either by the pines or near the pool at our suburban home, cook hot dogs on green sticks over a campfire, roast marshmallows to sticky perfection, watch darkness gather, and chase fireflies. Then we’d climb into sleeping bags and fall asleep arm in arm, listening to cricket song and night breeze.
This became our tradition on the eve of his birthday—starting when he was barely four, ending only this year, his twelfth—because my wheelchair-bound body can no longer rise from sleeping on the ground. I held on as long as I could, never revealing that last year it took me an hour of struggle and a long hands-and-knees crawl to the patio steps before I could stand—just before he woke.
When he was younger, we’d leave the tent up for days after our campouts. We’d break camp gradually, removing sleeping bags and toy trucks bit by bit, until finally pulling the stakes from the earth and storing everything away for the next time.
It was after one such campout. I was pulling stakes when something called me away. I left the tent open and unstaked as I hurried from the house. While I was gone, a thunderhead formed and swept through with such power that it lifted my beloved tent like a kite. It soared over the six-foot pool fence and the matching stockade fence around our yard, and then up—up into the sky.
When I returned, I realized it was gone. I checked around the yard and surrounding trees. I asked neighbors if they had seen it. I drove neighborhood roads for hours, searching. But it was gone. The storm winds could easily have carried that light, perfect sail for miles.
I like to imagine it landed in another yard with other children, continuing its adventures. But I will never know. I felt sadness at losing something that held so many memories. But there was nothing to be done.
That’s the thing about loss—we suffer more from the story than the reality.
The reality was that a tent I bought years earlier for less than $50 blew away in a windstorm.
But the story told me I had lost part of my youth—the sacred playground where my kids, when they were little enough to be thrilled by an afternoon snuggling in a backyard campground, felt closest to me.
And while I appreciated the poetic way it was lost—not succumbing to mildew in a damp basement but ascending into the sky—the loss still stung.
Letting go is difficult. And not just of airborne camping gear. Life entails so much loss.
We live with constant change—losing things, losing people, aging, sickness, death. We cling to stories of what ought to have been and what should be, even though they make us suffer. Their weight exhausts us, robs us of the freedom in the present moment, and paralyzes us with guilt or fear. To cling to what is intrinsically impermanent is to suffer.
As the old saying goes: Let go, or be dragged.
But what is letting go?
Letting go does not mean you stop caring. It does not mean blocking out or ignoring pain. It is not surrender. There is nothing passive about it.
Letting go is the choice to drop the narrative and encounter reality as it is.
Letting go is about responding, not merely reacting.
Letting go is allowing yourself to be drenched by the cloudburst—shivering in the cold rain, shuddering at the violent clap of thunder, feeling the hair on your arms rise as lightning strikes nearby—and still finding the courage to keep watching as the sky clears, to splash in the warm puddles, and then to reach for a towel to dry your soaked hair.
Letting go is the courage to face whatever comes in its raw fullness—without dramatizing it, without clinging—and to boldly declare your freedom with a still, unwavering:
“Nevertheless.”