2. The works of Being Human/Surrender

I walked. A veld fire had ripped through the bushveld, devouring everything in its path. The night was closing in and all that was left were the rocks and the smoldering skeletons of trees standing in defiance.

It was the darkest night yet and I was lost. The usual winter starry sky was eclipsed by a thick layer of mist and smoke, obscuring the path I knew so well. I was a stranger in my own land and nothing felt familiar.

The silence was deafening. The jackal, rabbits and caracal had moved off and even the crickets could not muster up enough energy to sing their song. A sense of nothingness overcame me. I let go. I let everything that is, be. In that moment, I had no past or knew no future, just the ghostly silence of a moment, a blank page void of ink, a map of nowhere.

I surrendered. The fight in me was gone and all that I felt mattered, mattered no more. It did not matter at that point because I had had a change of heart or that something had happened to me that made me realise what is important and what is not, but rather I’d lost all my strength to fight and to hold onto fear. Suddenly the fear of rejection, the fear of being judged, the fear of not being accepted, the fear of losing control, the fear of being misunderstood had all become too big for me to hold on to.  Too big and too inauthentic to survive. I had unintentionally let go of my fears and surrendered to the darkness. I was alone, broken and free of the shackles of fear.

It was a long night. I stopped walking. This well-worn path I had used so often was barely visible and increasingly futile as the night curtain rolled down. It was not taking me to where I truly wanted to go. It was a winding path, walked by many but not my own.  I succumbed to being lost and found a comfortable rock, curved and smooth in the centre, a rock I could sit down on and sink into.

Cradled in that rock, the night consumed me. Memories and emotions took hold of me and for the first time, I did not resist any of it. I felt it all; grief, pain, anger, rejection, resentment, conflict and aloneness.  I felt everything I had not wanted to and on that dark, relentless, all consuming lonely night, I completely surrendered to what what was and what is. And it was a relief to feel my pain.

Rosie Goes©2021