Marena Bronson: Surrender

I like words. I like the way they sound. Their subtle shades of meaning. It’s the way they come together sometimes… painting the perfect beat…like a melody without music. Words have power. The right words, in the right combination, at the right time have the power to change your life. Think about that for a minute, because it is literally an Earth-moving statement.

Words have the power to change your life.

Some people collect dolls. I collect words. Words from writers I love. Words that can tell the secret story of my heart. I have come to trust in the power of a few well-chosen words to reveal to the world something I can’t say, or don’t want to say, or didn’t even know I needed to say. I’ve heard, “you’re a writer,” most of my life. I don’t know about that. But I do know I have words inside of me. Sometimes I can feel them. I needed a place to keep them...so here we are.

I’ve been thinking a lot about change lately. Life is always changing, but it seems like the nature of humans is to resist change. Why is that?

We live in a river of change, and a river of change lives within us. If we wanted to, and we had a powerful enough microscope, we could sit and stare at our hands and watch the river of change flowing inside our bodies right now. We could watch our cells dying. Being replaced. Over and over again - year after year. Who we were yesterday is not who we are today…literally. Our skin is new every month. Our lungs every two-weeks. Our liver every 6 weeks. We breathe in elements from other organisms to create new cells every time we inhale. And when we exhale, we send parts of ourselves out into the atmosphere… out into the universe.

I love the water. I always have. The way it feels just to float, letting it carry me along. Surrendering myself to it. Somewhere along the way I’ve forgotten how to do that. How did I let that happen?

“I’ve known rivers,” writes Langston Hughes. “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Every day we all have a choice. We can relax and float in the direction the water is flowing, or we can swim hard against the current. If we go with the river, we have the energy of thousands of mountain streams with us. If we resist, we’re going to get tired… and eventually, we’re going to start treading water. Stuck.

I’m tired.

Am I going to surrender to the flow of my river nature today, or am I going to swim against the tide of life? I think that’s what I’m going to start asking myself when I get up in the morning. I want to know what it feels like again to follow my soul downstream. Because I have known rivers… and once you have known rivers – once you’ve let go and stretched yourself out on the waters, going in the direction of life even if it’s head-first into the rapids… you want to experience what that water feels like again. You want your soul to grow deep like the rivers again.

I want to grow deep like the rivers again.

Time to Surrender….