Let Go, Surrender: Don’t Resist the Pull of the Earth.
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Give up your clinging to wanting things to be easier. Simpler. Less messy and nearing completion. For things to smoothly run, for perfect harmony in shared endeavors.
For situations to be free of conflict or complication, agendas or aggression. For someday to not be in the middle of an ongoing entanglement. These are not outrageous dramas: they are everyday difficulties that require an attitude of acceptance in order to be dealt with.
Stop pretending only peace, love, and good will get brought into our meetings and our missions. Motives are mixed. Don’t fight them. For then all of your precious energy gets used up only to be at odds. Don’t send them away. Don’t run away, then gossip about them. Don’t complain with emptying despair. Wrestle with them, so as to work with them. They are your raw materials. What will you create with them?
I know this sounds like the last thing you’d like to consider. You resist as quickly as an eyelid bats away anything that comes too close to the delicate, vulnerable structure of the undefended eye. You’re about to put up a thousand reasons as to why this would be a terrible move, I know, and it is most understandable. It threatens what you are afraid of: submission to a depressing norm which is called Life on Earth.
As a compassionate, detached witness, I try to resist you by instead feeling the pain you inadvertently put yourself through each and every day in which you suffer the clash between a complicated reality and a mind-spun utopia, where you struggle in the gap between your constructs and what materializes in your everyday dealings. Stop struggling.
Become congruent with what is instead of futilely wishing for an alternative or devising schemes to uncomplicate complicated reality.
Vision is needed. Your tireless commitment to what could be is a virtue. But try not to divorce ambition from actuality. In this gap in which you struggle, problems arise. And a split is induced that puts us right back into the very dualism, polarity, and divisiveness that the Advaita Vedanta has ached to overcome since the dawn of written language was recorded in ancient Sanskrit.
That split creates a chasm, an unbridgeable severance of connection between parts that need to be mended to be whole again. It is the same as when you make yourself an opponent of disappointing circumstances and troublesome patterns with dysfunctional lineages.
It sounds simple, but is not easily achieved: make your enemy — what you fight, set yourself apart from, dis-identify with — into your life partner.
Let this piece of writing get through the last holdout that wants to perpetuate itself in retaining enemies, in holding strong over that which you believe you are not, in that antagonistic energy of setting yourself apart and against as leverage to be used as a platform for taking a stand.
Let this be a conduit for another way, collecting up bits and pieces of scattered wisdom stumbled over, through which to weave a new perspective:
May it suggest a divine union, a sacred engagement, a passionate pact made between what is usually held in opposition.
May you start with making peace between your ideals and your reality. Of connecting the part of you which stands on the hard Earth with the part which gropes for all that lies beyond and strewn in the sky.
Don’t resist the pull of the dark, dank, soft-yet-solid Earth.
Grow roots into its recesses, send tendrils of wet, slimy branches underneath festering swamps, reach for the decomposing bits in its soils, reconnect with the realms of spore-reproducing ferns, fungi, minerals, and microscopic blobs of protoplasm, meld your being with its firm, unyielding, granitic foundations, that which resists change but provides stable structure across gaping mouths of geologic time.
Grow them deep and strong, grow without fear or hesitation: you were made from this Earth as was all that you are unavoidably entangled with. Drill down into your common source. Let go. Surrender. Accept that you will never fully, or even largely, transcend your matter, your body, this matrix, or the momentum of your fate.
Send out these roots, and until then, keep rooting, then, and only then, dream big. Reach for the heavens with rib cage splayed open as pulsating heart renders itself available to sunshine pouring forth its relentless rays.
Let your radiated, radiating heart extend outward across the ligaments in your shoulders, the taut muscles in your triceps, down into your forearms, wrists, and electrified fingertips, seizing and singing the praises of fresh inspiration!
But don’t disconnect and fly away from your origins. Remain embodied. Work with what is. Don’t reject it as base or beneath you. It is beneath you, but not as you habitually perceive. It is the fertile matrix from which you emerged and will always be emerging.
Our medieval ancestors were superstitious. Our ancestors before them were barbaric. We carry these lines in our blood. Focus on freeing yourself not from them but from the prison of your own expectations, absolutely divorced from what has been and what is.
Your magnificent ideals populate in your starry-eyed open mind. Coax them into the field of reality with tender, intelligent skill. Breathe them into the durable structures you live in kindly and patiently. Test them against the natural receptivity of the earth. Plant seeds and nurture them. Give up what will happen from there.
Hold your ideals lightly. You watch over them with stubborn vigilance. Watch over them with the unflinching eye of grace. Plant them. In the dark, dank, soft-yet-solid Earth. Then pray over them. An invitation, never an obligation. An invitation, never an obligation.
An invitation.
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Sarah McKelvey is a free spirit who enjoys introspecting, speculating, and writing about life, love, synchronistic experiences, identity, psyche, self-cultivation, and her various misadventures. She typically writes in the context of traveling, and is informed by Eastern wisdom traditions, depth psychology, and the iconoclastic teachings of Alan Watts. Words are her favorite medium. In her pursuits, she pursues truth, beauty, and goodness, and hopes to, through her endeavors and writing, promote a life-affirming attitude that belongs on the spectrum of love. She lives along the Front Range outside of Denver, and practices psychotherapy professionally.
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