Tiny Acts of Surrender
Guatemalan Textile
“Eventually you will see that the real cause of problem is not life itself. It’s the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes the problems”
At the beginning of this year I sat down with friends to make vision boards, the way we do every January, and something felt different before I even started. I did not want a board full of goals. Every year the goals start to feel like a race against myself, a productivity contest with no finish line, and I was tired of it in a way that went deeper than tiredness, more like a quiet refusal that had been building for a long time without me giving it a name. So I decided to focus on one thing instead: flow. Which sounds peaceful and maybe even a little poetic until life decides to take you at your word.
When you make that kind of internal decision, you do not always understand what you are really asking for. You romanticize the outcome, you picture something gentle and open, and you do not account for the fact that flow sometimes means the ground shifting underneath you before the river finds its new direction.
In March I started saying out loud that I no longer felt aligned with my job. The values I was told the company held did not match what I saw every day, and I felt disconnected in a way that had started to feel permanent, like a low hum of wrongness I had learned to live around. I knew something had to change and I also did not feel ready to make it change, so I stayed, because staying felt safer and I had rent to pay and a routine that held me upright even when not much else did. A few weeks later I was laid off, in an ordinary meeting on an ordinary morning, and it was not dramatic and it was business and it still landed in that complicated place where sadness and anger and something that felt uncomfortably close to relief all arrive at the same time and you do not quite know what to do with any of them. I had worked so hard to get to that job, to earn that income, to believe in myself again, and the grief of that was real even alongside the relief, even alongside the part of me that had already, quietly, asked the universe for something different.
Exploration of the piece.
I had been reading The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer, a book about learning to trust life's unfolding even when it does not go the way you planned, and it arrived at exactly the right moment the way the right things sometimes do when you are finally ready to receive what they are saying. I sat with all of it, the loss and the relief and the fear and the strange tenderness of being cracked open by something you did not choose, and I made Undulation. Four woven pieces that hold exactly what I was moving through: the rising and the falling, the uncertainty that does not resolve on your timeline, the soft release of a grip you have been holding so long you forgot it was a choice. The textile came from Guatemala, from a trip where I returned to a volcano I had climbed alone the year before, the hardest physical thing I have ever done, and this time I went with friends and everything felt lighter and warmer and more possible, the same mountain transformed by the people beside me. That material carries all of that. The first climb and the second one. The alone and the together. The fear and what comes after you keep going anyway.
Friends in Volcan de Fuego, Guatemala
I am still figuring things out, and I want to say that honestly rather than wrap it in a bow it does not deserve. The pressure of rent and time and uncertainty has not disappeared and there are days when the anxious voice is very loud and very convincing. But I am learning, slowly and imperfectly, to tell the difference between that voice and the quieter one underneath it, the one that has always known more than I give it credit for, and I am trying to make more room for the second one. Creating without knowing what something will become has been one of the most reliable ways I have found to practice that. You put your hands into the material and you follow what it asks for and somewhere in that process something loosens, enough to remember that you do not have to hold quite so tight to make things work out. Maybe that is what I was really asking for when I said I wanted flow. Maybe that is what this whole year has been trying to teach me.
Video credits @yev_jackson
