Surrender
Tell me, where do you run to when you run from yourself?
Perhaps you lay down with the earth and the wild flowers in a faraway field, make a cocoon amongst the soft grass and your memories of lives long lost. You trade pentacles for your life, for your blood sweat and all your tears. You fashion elaborate walls of them both inside and out to give you an illusion of safety. Still, the frost of winter pierces through your defences to reach your heart, and you are overcome sometimes with the longing to reunite with yourself, to dance once more in fields of your own creation.
Maybe you float high on currents of air, head full of the soft scent of rain, the electric pulse of lightning and the pounding of thunder. You are lost in thought, sword by your side, building vast palaces of fantasies in the air. Empty structures that melt suddenly like candyfloss in your mouth, and you find yourself stood naked at the feet of reality once more with a mouth full of sweet nothings.
Do you dive trembling into the belly of the fire, clutching your faithful wand, hoping to be burnt to ash and swept away? Some small voice echoes inside you, trying to tell you that this fire will never compare to the internal inferno that would rage if you’d only meet yourself. Razing whole forests of twisted self beliefs to the ground, allowing space for the growth of healthy new shoots.
Or is it in the depths of still waters you look for peace? Curled up inside a golden cup, spirit numbed motionless by immense pressure, ever vigilant of the strange and terrible fish called despair, and love, and anger, and joy; fish that nibble at your tender flesh and demand acknowledgement. You try so desperately to fill that cup, and yet all the oceans would not be enough, for it wants only to be filled from the springs of your inner knowing.
Sweet one, where do you run to? Why do you run, when you contain all that is? When you have every tool you need? Why not stay awhile and refine the masterpiece you already are? There are whole galaxies unconquered behind your eyes. There are infinite planets of strange, rare, unimaginable beauty, and they are filled with endless resources for you to mine, to refine into diamonds and bring back to this earth as your art. So listen to that soft voice, urging you to go within. Stop running to fields and castles, to fires and lakes that are not of your creation in search of solace.
Start running home, and you will find a peace in this life and inside yourself. A solace that is eternal, unshakeable, immutable and almost beyond words. Run to yourself, and you will find yourself waiting there, where you have always been.
