It has been almost six months since I’ve written a newsletter; the last one in honor of Yoko Ono’s cleaning pieces for the new year. In that time there has been a lot of change, which is always a catalyst for inner reflection and (after a bout of stubbornness) inner work. I hadn’t felt like I processed enough of it to really have something to write about. Life kept unfolding and shifting as it does, with and without warning. I didn’t feel like I could really catch up. I don’t know exactly where to begin, besides with the thoughts in my mind right now. I used this platform in such a formal way that it was easy to leave myself out of it. Since starting this I’ve found myself asking: How can I share, and in some ways offer guidance, if I myself am still figuring it out? Which left me without words to give until I remembered that’s how I’ve always approached writing: in the midst of a journey, on my way to understanding something and sharing what I learn along the way. What I loved most about writing online and sharing with a community back when tumblr was big was being so vulnerable and personal that everything felt like part of a diary entry or a conversation between friends. So on that note:

In the past 6 months there has been a lot coming to me and unfolding. I dealt with a strange traumatic event and simultaneously took on a second job with little time to myself. In the midst of processing different layers of things and facing my own challenge of stepping up in ways I’m not used to, my dog Ellie passed away. If you’ve followed me for a long time on any platform then you knew her. She was the first dog that was my dog. I adopted her when I was living alone in the warehouse apartment in my early twenties. I think she saved me, as dogs seem to do. She brought so much warmth and meaning to my life, along with joy and silliness and responsibility. We had a soul level connection, sharing emotions and understanding each other in a way that I hadn’t experienced before. She suddenly got very, very sick and within two weeks she was gone. I have known grief before, it wasn’t new to me. But it had been years since death had entered my life. So I got to know grief again, which cracks you open whether you want it to or not.

Ellie was dying when spring was coming. I spent every day with her in the front yard under the blooming crabapple tree. she was lying in a bed of violets, I was near her reading Dune and just watching her breathe, watching her take in the world around her. She passed the day before my birthday when the lilacs were blooming and the earth was coming to life. The grief that I felt reintroduced surrender to me. I had to surrender to everything it made me feel. I had to surrender to a reality that was out of my control. I had been living in a subtle but enveloping state of resistance for a while by then. I don’t think that I realized that until Ellie. For months I hadn’t been leaning into the changes in my life. I still felt bitter about some things, lazy about others, and generally dissatisfied with the way that my life was, yet not actually doing anything about it. I stayed in my resistance like an act of defiance, like making a statement (to who, I don’t know) that I didn’t like this so I was just going to be bitter about it instead of doing anything one way or another. But nothing can put life into perspective like grief can. I’d prayed for Ellie to heal, but after a few days I realized maybe it would be best to pray for her to be protected and feel at peace in whatever way it needed to be. This was the true surrender. I knew that resisting what was happening would mean that I’d also be resisting my chance to love her fully now, to be with her fully now. That was almost two months ago, and I have allowed grief to do what it does whenever it feels like it. To resist it is to build walls around myself, to make a quiet enemy of the world, of the way it is. All of this brought me to thinking about surrender vs resistance. How leaning into one over the other can change your life and your energy, and how there is a third option that sneaks its way in.

Living in resistance isn’t always obvious. It sneaks up on you, shows up in your daily habits, in how you cope with uncomfortable feelings or dissatisfaction. It feels like an added weight on you. When you are in resistance, nothing can grow for you. You can’t be as creative, you can’t be as loving, you can’t be as open. When you resist the present moment, you miss the message that it has for you. Resistance against your present reality is a bad act of rebellion. You’re really just punishing yourself. The more you resist the present moment, the more you resist actually feeling the feelings it brings up in you, which only intensifies it. If you are resisting your life then you are not present and you can’t see any of it clearly. I can dream of being a writer, but resist the fact that I work 50-70 hours a week in the service industry and be so bothered by that that I zone out and write nothing, change nothing, embrace nothing. If I can’t surrender to the current circumstances of my life then I can’t learn to play with it, I can’t take advantage of the gifts it has for me, I can’t feel the depths of it. I felt that resisting parts of my reality would somehow manifest the reality I desired. I wanted to skip all of the steps and just be in the next phase of my life, essentially without doing any of the labor or decision-making it takes to get there. I think life has been asking me every month: “Are you going to resist this, too? Can you sit with this? Can you move with it, lean in, lean out, let it be all the way real without dissociating from it?” and I was avoiding answering.

When you surrender to you life, every little thing begins to unfold. The joy in your jobs that aren’t your dream job, the gratitude that comes with caring for a home that needs work, cherishing the time you have with those you love and with yourself when you have little of it to spare. All of the secrets and joys and pains reveal themselves to you like tiny jewels hidden in pockets of a heavy coat you were wearing every day. The coat gets lighter and more vibrant. You can see where you shame lives and where it stems from, and you can see that you can heal that. You can see where the magic of your life is as it is now, even when it is not the dream. You can have genuine gratitude. You can feel lucky and you can feel bored, and you can then decide what you’re going to do with those things. You can ease into the space you’ve created for yourself and let go of comparison. You can start where you are, which is a beautiful place to be. Surrender allows you to move with lightness. There is a gentle ease that begins to show through.

The more I leaned into surrender, the more I started to think about a third thing that is birthed from this surrender that leads to a more aligned life. If you are to resist completely and stay there, then you are seeing nothing. You are living in your own illusion, in a disconnect from your life. If you are to surrender completely and stay there, then you are not owning your life. You are allowing life to just happen to you. In between there is a dance. This dance requires honesty, self reflection, passion, and an open heart. In between is where you find your autonomy. This is where I want to live, and I know that to get there you have to fully surrender first. You have to see your life all the way (or as much as you can from your vantage point) and then make decisions based on what you see. You can begin to make decisions that a future-self would make. You can learn to honor the dream that lies within, that craves a new way of living. You learn to play. You have to have a certain amount of compassion for the present moment. Move with ease and honor every opportunity you get along the path that you’re on. Each thing has a secret message for you that you most likely won’t understand for years to come. Everything has it’s place. There is so much we can’t know about our lives. We can resist everything and build a dream world, but we’re still here. We have to build a bridge between the two. We can find the dance and move with it, seeing all of the micro-decisions we can make in the now that will bring us closer to a rich life. Once we are able to surrender we can see the varying paths that lie ahead. We can get glimpses into other possibilities, which will allow us to choose to show up differently in our current realities.

JOURNAL PROMPTS FOR SURRENDER & RESISTANCE:

What areas in your life do you feel resistance toward?
Is there something that feels out of your hands that you could surrender to, even a little bit?
Are there moments in your daily life that you’ve given over to dissociating where instead you could do something kind for yourself? What would you do instead?
How can you begin to bridge the gap between where you are now and where you want to be?
Where do you think you can dance with life more? Embrace play?

Thank you for subscribing and for reading. I’ll be sharing a newsletter every other week from now on.

Emery