The Stone, the Feather, and the Message.
Surrender, spirit, and the strange grace of being reshaped in the dark.
Thank you to all who attended last Sunday's contemplative session on the topic of surrender. You felt like a room full of old friends. I've been drifting in and out of your faces and voices ever since, followed around in the best way by your sincerity and longing. We were not just speaking but remembering something essential.
Only now am I beginning to understand what surrender means. Perhaps it's because I'm getting older. Perhaps it's where we are collectively. What once kept me braced is giving way. I hear it in the voices around me. I feel it in my own body. There's a shared, shaky knowing that something new is emerging. The grip we've all held so tightly is loosening.
I realize I am at the mercy of what unfolds. Opting out is not an option. It is impossible to remain untouched. And I say that not to remove our agency, but to ask—what kind of posture do we want to meet life from?
I have been reaching, almost unconsciously, for some untouchable equanimity, for some spiritual utopia. Some place of exemption where I could stay above the sometimes senseless things we human beings do and the gridlock of despair.
But I'm beginning to realize how much I want to live within my experience, not above it. This moment, in my heart, in my body, I want to be here. Fully inhabited. Engaged. Available. I no longer crave absolution from the turmoil of being alive. I want to stay. I want to remain inside it all without running from myself or the world.
I find it hard to do. Still, I want to eject. Still, I want to fix, flee, or evolve myself out of discomfort—pull my fear out by the root. I keep searching for the way out, only to find it is myself I'm always trying to escape. But beneath the urge to abandon and disown, a part of me is showing how to belong to it all.
I see and accept that I am already split open. The thing I'm trying so hard to preserve has already been given to life.
The act of surrender is not something I do. It's something I am already. It is not a choice but a condition to being alive.