Surrender

I am beginning to understand that each time I surrender, the universe reveals to me that I am still holding on.

Just as my every exhale is followed by an inhale—only when the final breath leaves this body will my grasping cease.

Perhaps you can never be fully surrendered; you can only be surrendering.

To surrender, you must hold.

Some think surrender is to live in detachment. If you were to draw back the curtain of this fantasy, you would see them curled on the floor clutching their Ryan Holiday pseudo-stoic novels. They are building a spiritual bypass, desperately trying not to feel.

To live without reaching is not to live at all. To live is to brush shoulders with gods as we walk through the misty woods, and to embrace the divine for exactly as long as the fates would allow.

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

— Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods

Surrender is an act of deep faith and worship. It is the blessing of a void left in your heart—the creation of a sacred space from which to sit in communion with that loss. To break bread with your shadow and to depart anointed and whole.

To surrender is to see that your pain and fear were guardian angels in disguise—holding you and leading you home. A sacred synchronicity.

Surrender is not to finally stumble out of the wintery woods and discover the hidden meadow of an eternal summer. Surrender is to grow your heart so as to hold space for all seasons. It is to understand that the summer cannot be without the winter. It is to integrate the shadows of one's soul.

Surrender is a remembering of something ancient. It is to stand at the threshold and listen to the quiet whispers of the soul. To accept the primeval purpose it shares.

Surrender is to soften as the sun rises, and once again as it sets.

Surrender is to come home when you never left.