Surrender has always been a word and an act I’ve been wary of. I grew up going to church, so the main iteration I had of “surrender” was surrendering to God. It turns out this concept is quite indicative of the meaning of surrender no matter if it’s used in a religious context or not. The fact that I separate the two probably tells you church didn’t quite work out for me. There’s a world of difference between suckling at the spoon-fed teat of the Lord and experiencing the kinds of unholy hell and estatic bliss that result in true faith in any higher power. Or, as Emily Sailers described it (which I loved) on Glennon Doyle’s most recent podcast, “something that is not of the physical world that is in relationship with the physical world.”
The part I’ve never quite liked about surrender is that it happens in relationship to another, and the way I learned it as a child, that other was typically a white-washed, aggressively straight, wrathful, shame-inducing male. What could go wrong? Giving up my own source of power to an archetype so tired, worn out, and clearly so truly powerless at its core doesn’t appeal to me. So, what is this other? When we all say surrender, no matter what the context, who or what are we surrendering to?
This past weekend I went to Sequoia National Park. I spent a lot of time talking to the trees there. Actually—correction—I spent a lot of time driving around the park with impatience and frustration looking for a fucking answer as to why I felt so fed up that week. Los Angeles prays to mercury in retrograde when the center won’t hold. I go to the trees. I whine and moan and bitch and huff around National Parks and curse Reagan and go look for God there.
I spent a few hours annoyed I hadn’t already been given the answer. “I drove four plus hours up here to see you, trees!” In hindsight, the demand makes me cackle. I assure you that, as it was happening, it was not funny. I was not having it. There was no window for the absolute comedy playing out that any stranger could’ve pin-pointed with the clarity of my neighbor—a man who often calls people out on their soul’s shtick while they promptly look disappointed at being found out. So much of being human is giving ourselves over to frustration and truly being knee-deep in it just so other people can enjoy it as a source of laughter. Hopefully those people also love us and throw us a compassionate rope before shedding light on the obvious.
Finally, after driving around looking for so long for a place I could be alone without any tourists, I pulled off the road near a few trees that looked good enough for a picture. This was the singular goal I could find in all my fury. I wanted to get a picture of a giant sequoia with a human in it for scale because it’s nearly impossible to conceive their size otherwise.
Given I had been entertaining not wanting to be alive all day (not a new thought for me or most people I know who are tuned into the poor health of the earth these days), I walked the length of a fallen sequoia trunk that had suffered some weird reverse decapitation—cut off at its ankles, its years of growth entirely hushed. Because I’m ABSOLUTELY SILLY and had no more rage to spare, I asked this trunk what I should do about my thoughts about wanting to be dead. Its response (which I’m totally aware was from my own mind) was, “I don’t care I’m dead.”
Thank God for this tree. I don’t know which God, but I know in this moment that there is one. Upon hearing its response, I lighten up a little. I find it hilarious. I’m not sure what to do about the current mental health crisis in young people everywhere, but with all sincerity, I do think remembering how to talk to trees would help immensely.
So what are we surrendering to? Who is this other? On my drive out of the park, I turn on “Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls. It passes in my periphery that my love of the Indigo Girls might be flashes of a lesbian awakening as it has been for so many. You never know; life is long. Suddenly, I remember Glennon Doyle interviewed them recently and decide to go listen. The duo discusses their intrinsic cosmic tie with many lesbian awakenings, affirming my curiosity, as well as other things. Chief among them the earlier quote I referenced, my new favorite description of God.
I think this is God. This whole swirl and jumble of events leading me to the park, to that dead tree trunk, to asking the question, and to getting back to that podcast and hearing such an apt description come from a songwriting hero of mine who I previously didn’t know was from Georgia—my own place of birth. God is listening to her raspy voice and seeing images flash through my mind of a childhood so beautiful play against a background so dysfunctional and watching it all become tender music in my own head. God is later sharing with a friend that I wanted to write a piece on surrender and hearing her response in offering “perpetual creative response” as an alternative to surrender—something I love for its implication that we are not separate from the surrender; that there is not any other to contend with, but a force to join up and create with. God is every voice that finds me—the one that feels like dying, the one that makes a joke of it, and the one that comes through the speaker with much better wisdom than I’ve ever garnered alone. God is the fact that I needed to see a picture of a giant sequoia tree with myself standing inside of it for scope.
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