Surrender
“We
live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender...”
John
O'Donahue
In
The Book of Awakening, Mark Nepo recalls a memory of walking
beside a lake in the middle of the day, and seeing a small duck a
little way from the shore with its head tucked into its wing,
sleeping. He was struck by the duck's ability to surrender so
completely. How human it is to calculate risk—to look at that duck,
sound asleep in the bright sunlight, and think 'anything could
happen' from a big snapping turtle, to a hungry osprey, or eagle.
Usually, we consider that kind of risk to be just plain stupid. I can
hear my mother's warning voice now, “You should know better than
that!”
We're
safety cautious, no doubt with good reason, but sometimes surrender
is absolutely necessary. Sometimes, we must be willing to let go of
our habitual surroundings in order to expand and grow. It often means
giving up a comfortable rut, the familiar trappings of life, what we
consider to be 'secure.' A friend said to me the other day, “I've
never had a job I liked,” and yet another said, “I stayed in a
job I hated for 25 years...” Security can be confining to the point
of crippling us, deforming our inner spark. It's very hard to spread
one's wings inside a box, even a fancy box.
We
are afraid that if we let go, and surrender to life's call, we will
fall forever. There will be no safety net to catch us. In the words
of Eckhart Tolle, “...Say 'yes' to life and see how life suddenly
starts to work for you rather than against you.” It might be worth
a try. Surrender may be the ticket to a whole new way of being in the
world. An even better way.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment