STEPHANIE Nuño

“…[S]urrender has got to be genuine, uncontrived, wholehearted: I have got to really abandon all hope and fear, with nothing to gain and nothing to lose…[T]o create, you have to disappear. We create and respond from the wonderful empty place that is generated when we surrender” (Nachmanovitch 142 and 144).

I don’t sit well in empty. I fill myself “…with all sorts of stimulation, keeping busy to avoid that unpleasant, queasy feeling of facing [my] own emptiness” (Nachmanovitch 144). It is because of this incessant need to quite the silence that change has never been something I was good at – fraught with anxiety and worry, I need the security that comes with regularity and consistency. I believe this to be a learned behaviour, the aversion to change. “We split ourselves into controller and controlled. We say ‘control yourself’ to the addict or procrastinator. We attempt to control our environment” (Nachmanovitch 143). The irony is that despite my desperate trying to be the conductor of my own experience, the past two years have blindsided me with nothing but change: new schools, new students, new last names, new conflicts, new struggles, new blocks, new epiphanies, new births, new illnesses – none of it anything that I could control.

“Unconditional surrender comes when I fully realize – not in my brain but in my bones – that what my life or art has handed me is bigger than my hands, bigger than any conscious understanding I can have of it, bigger than any capacity that is mine alone” (Nachmanovitch 146). I cannot carry it all. Acknowledging my own limitations and letting go to the truth that my hands simply aren’t big enough - admitting to myself that I the lover, the daughter, the student, the teacher, the artist, needs to let go in order to allow myself to become full – has been one of the most difficult acts of surrender I have encountered.

Inside of the largest hands, the container that is time, there must be forgiveness in the passage of it; for it is not the fault of the second, minute, or hour that present becomes past. It is with time that we learn. In learning lies growth. With growth, we change. So in this moment, unshackled and stripped bare, I submit myself to change. I will walk with “[t]he unknown as my companion and here…I [will find] comfort” (Rickets 7) –  here, I will surrender.