Blü • VII

SURRENDER

The dock is steady.
The water is patient.
And Blü is waiting.

I stepped out of the cooled house into air that was already thick.
Humidity and salt hung heavy with no breeze to move them.
The morning felt stagnant by the heat that had been building for days.

The ground was warm underfoot.
Barefoot on the sand I could feel how little the night had cooled it.
The heat had stayed in the earth.

Mostly quiet.
A bird chirp here and there.
In the live oaks the usual early argument had not yet started.
Everything else was already looking for refuge from the day that was coming.

The freshwater pools had dried up, so I filled the birdbath on the way.

The boards of the dock were already hot.
I hurried across them into the cover of the dock and stood there under the shade.

The air was still thick.
The ground still held the night’s heat.
The boards were still warm behind me.

I stayed under the cover and let the morning keep unfolding.

Out beyond the pilings the tide was completely out.
The water had only just begun to turn and push back in.
What stretched in front of me was mostly pluff mud, dark and drying under the sun that would soon cover it again.

The mud did not resist.
It simply waited, open, surrendering itself to the returning water so the rich minerals could penetrate deep within.

The river is funny that way.
It does not ask.
It does not complain.
It does what it does.

The same way the waves on a beach rise and fall.
The same way we rise and fall throughout our days.

I watched the water beginning to gather itself again beyond the mud.
Nothing had changed quickly, but nothing had stayed exactly where it was.

Often in life we hurry through collecting and building new ideas while old ones are still running in the past.

We move from one thing to the next as if the previous can simply be left behind. A new job. A new relationship. A new project. A new place to live. We tell ourselves we have moved on because the scenery changed. Because enough time has passed. Because the people around us stopped asking.

But the old things do not always know that we have moved on.

Somewhere in the background they keep running.

We carry the loss of loved ones. We mourn the loss of a friend or even the family dog. We remember the last conversation and wonder if we should have stayed another five minutes. We think about the phone call we did not make, the visit we kept putting off, the words we should have said while there was still someone there to hear them.

Grief has a strange way of turning love into an interrogation.

What if I had known?

What if I had done more?

What if I had been there?

What if the last thing I said had been different?

There is no answer.
The moment is gone.
Still, we can spend years putting ourselves on trial for evidence that no longer exists.

Then sometimes we feel guilty for grieving too long. Guilty because life has continued. Guilty the first time we laugh without thinking about them. Guilty when an entire afternoon passes and we realize we did not think about them at all.

We can even become guilty about the guilt.

Human beings are funny that way.

We can build a prison from something that began as love.

Things happen to us that we can never get back.

A door closes. A voice is gone. A presence that once filled a room is simply no longer there. A marriage ends. Someone we trusted betrays us. A job disappears and takes with it a title we thought told the world who we were. Someone tells us when we are young that we are not good enough, not smart enough, not attractive enough, not strong enough, and forty years later we can still hear their voice coming out of our own mouth.

Some people carry things far heavier than that.

Things done to them that should never have happened.

Things they witnessed that they cannot unsee.

Moments when another human being took something from them without permission.

There are experiences that divide a life into before and after.

We do not all carry the same tragedies. We do not need to. Live long enough and life will hand each of us something we would have refused if we had been given the choice.

No amount of forward motion returns what has already been taken.

Life is tragic and time can be healing.

The healing does not erase. It does not make the loss smaller. It does not change what happened.

It changes our relationship to what happened.

Sometimes the change is so slow we do not notice it until one morning the load feels different. The memory is still there. The person is still gone. The betrayal still happened. The scar has not disappeared.

But something has shifted.

I looked back out across the water.

The tide was still working its slow return. More of the pluff mud had disappeared under the thin sheet of water. What had been drying in the sun was already being covered again.

The change was quiet.

No announcement.

No hurry.

The same mud that had been open to the heat was now open to the water. It did not argue with what had happened while the tide was gone. It did not demand the river return what the sun had taken from it.

The water simply came back.

I stayed under the cover of the dock and watched the line of water keep moving inland, inch by inch, without needing anything from me.

I noticed the breath.

The top of the inhale.

The pause.

The bottom of the exhale.

The pause again.

I stayed there a little longer than usual.

Nothing forced.

Nothing asking me to become anything.

Just the natural stopping places.

There is something inside those pauses that we spend much of our lives avoiding. We fill them with noise. We reach for the phone. We start another project before finishing the one already burning in the background. We move into another relationship and carry the last person through the door with us.

Someone betrayed us once, so now we watch someone new for signs of an old crime.

A late text becomes evidence.

A change in tone becomes suspicion.

A quiet evening becomes something to investigate.

The person standing in front of us may have done nothing at all, but the person behind us is still in the room.

That is baggage.

Not remembering what happened.

Remembering is human.

The baggage is requiring someone who did not hurt us to answer for someone who did.

There is a difference.

Maybe surrender begins there.

Not by forgetting the betrayal. Not by pretending it did not change us. Not by becoming foolish enough to ignore what experience has taught us.

But by refusing to make the wound the judge of everything that comes next.

The tide kept moving.

I breathed again.

Being in this space creates a kind of permission.
Not permission from outside.
Something quieter.

We carry so much that never belonged to us.

Someone walks into a room after having a terrible day and hands it to us with their tone. Their anger. Their frustration. Their disappointment. Maybe we did nothing to create it, but suddenly we are holding it.

And most of us have been trained to accept the package.

We carry it into the next room. We let it change our own voice. We hand a piece of it to somebody else. By evening one person’s bad morning has traveled through four people who had nothing to do with it.

We do not have to accept it.

They can take it back.

That does not mean we become cruel. It does not mean we stop caring about people. It means compassion does not require possession.

I can understand your anger without making it mine.

I can hear your judgment without turning it into my identity.

I can know what you think of me without becoming what you think of me.

There are things we need to learn not to accept.

And there are things we need to accept that we have spent our entire lives trying to escape.

Ourselves.

That may be the harder surrender.

Because somewhere along the way most of us learned which pieces of ourselves were welcome and which ones should remain hidden.

So we built versions.

We become the strong one.
The dependable one.
The one who does not need anybody.
Sometimes it is success. Sometimes a title. A marriage. A house. A career.
Sometimes it is simply the version of us everyone else has grown comfortable seeing.

Some of those things are real parts of us. Some are useful. Some may even be beautiful.

But none of them are the whole person.

And eventually maintaining all those versions becomes its own kind of weight.

This is not about letting go.

I am not even sure we let go of everything.

There are things I do not want to let go of. Love is one of them. Memory is another. There are people who are gone whose weight I would rather learn to carry than pretend they meant so little that I could simply put them down.

Surrender is different.

Surrender does not always remove the weight.

Sometimes it ends the fight with the fact that the weight exists.

It lets grief be grief without turning it into guilt.

It lets betrayal remain in the past without requiring the next person to pay for it.

It lets another person’s anger remain theirs.

It lets an unfinished project be unfinished without turning it into evidence that we ourselves are unfinished.

It lets the titles fall away without believing our worth fell with them.

And somewhere underneath all of that is the person who has been there the entire time.

Not the improved version.

Not the healed version.

Not the version who finally got everything right.

The whole person.

The one with the scars and the mistakes. The one who has loved badly sometimes and beautifully at others. The one who has failed. The one who has survived. The one who has carried things too long and dropped things that should have been held tighter. The one who still has work to do.

That person.

Maybe surrender is finally allowing that person to be seen.

Maybe wholeness was never about repairing ourselves until nothing broken remained.

Maybe it was about no longer hiding the pieces.

I sat with that for a while.

The pauses kept coming.

Inhale.

Pause.

Exhale.

Pause.

The tide did not ask the mud what had happened while it was gone.

It simply returned.

And the mud received it.

When we surrender to who we are, something begins to change in the relationship with self. There is less need to defend. Less need to prove. Less energy spent managing the surface version while protecting the person underneath.

We are where we are by the choices we have taken. That remains true.

We have consequences.

We have scars.

We have things we would do differently if life were generous enough to give us another pass.

It is not.

But we do not have to keep paying for the same mistake every morning for the rest of our lives.

Acceptance does not mean approval.

Permission does not mean everything gets to stay.

Surrender does not mean defeat.

It means seeing what is there clearly enough to know the difference.

Some things happened to us.
Some things were done by us.
Some things were placed on us and carried so long we forgot they belonged to someone else.
Some things remain ours to carry.
Some can finally be left where they belong.

And somewhere inside that sorting, something becomes clear.

This is who I am.

Not because of the tragedy.

Not because of the title.

Not because of what somebody else decided I should be.

The person beneath all of it.

Whole.

The tide kept covering the mud.

I kept breathing.

Nothing had been erased.

Nothing needed to be.

I remained where I was on the dock.

The air was still thick with the morning heat.
The boards behind me still held the warmth of the sun.
Out beyond the pilings the tide continued its quiet return, covering more of the pluff mud with each slow push.

Nothing had rushed.
Nothing had needed to announce itself.

I watched the water keep moving inland and let the morning remain what it was.

Then I stepped off the boards onto the sandy path that leads toward the house.
My feet sank slightly with each step.
The live oaks stretched their shadows across the ground.

A squirrel was already in the birdbath.
The argument with the birds had begun.

I did not look back at the dock.
I did not need to.
The permission had already come with me.

Salt Air and Fire

King of Cainhoy 🇺🇸🔥

Unbroken🔥