The choice to surrender

Or how we find love

I went for a hike this past week…by myself, for a whole afternoon. I wasn’t cajoling a toddler to stay on a path or steering her away from picking every daffodil head. I wasn’t chatting with a friend or texting someone back on my phone. I was alone in the woods—and it was heaven.

The trail was one I hadn’t encountered before so everything was new to me. The faded blue ridgeline unfolding in layer after layer, the succulent veins of Virginia waterleaf blooming in wet pockets, the springs that flowed crystalline over the backs of unmovable mountain stone.

I hiked for a while before deciding to stop in a glen of moss-covered rocks. Facing the lowering sun, I settled myself in the nook of a beautifully crooked tree and connected with my own wider being. Not a book or a guided meditation. Not my ancestors, not my guides, not even the Earth. Just my own self, my own widest, highest self. The part of me I’m always a part of.

It felt like settling back into a warm bath after a long day. I could feel her, this wider self, holding me.

I decided to pick a card from the tarot deck I had with me. I heard her, this wider self, guiding me as I chose.

“This one,” she said, and I pulled The Lovers from the deck.

The Lovers is one of those cards I always want to get—who doesn’t? love, union, intimacy, integration—but it’s also one of those cards I never seem to get…probably because of how I yearn for it.

But sitting in that grove of moss and sunshine, feeling deeply connected with my own self, it suddenly felt completely, entirely right that I would pick The Lovers.

The description of this card, in whatever deck it appears, is always lovely. But this deck (the Druidcraft tarot) had a piece that struck me deeply.

Among the description of love as a field that connects us to our own widest origins, the great field of divinity for which we all yearn, was this quote: “to love requires surrender, and to surrender requires choice.”

There were flowers, there was ecstasy, and then there was this: That loving requires giving something up we’ve been holding onto. That loving requires choice.

It made me think about my daughter’s birth. How, before I went into it, I was told surrender would be one of the most important things I could do to bring her here. That I would have to, at some point, surrender.

Before her birth came, I thought that meant surrendering to the contractions. Surrendering to the intensity, to the unknown.

But in reality, the surrender required from birth, from becoming a parent, from loving as deep as you do, is so much vaster.

For me, birth meant surrendering nearly everything I had been holding onto.

Surrendering control. Surrendering the order of reality. Surrendering the entire way I viewed myself.

There was a moment, after nearly three days of laboring at home without progression, where I had a choice. I could stay at home and keep trying, or I could go to the hospital for an intervention.

And even though the choice, on the outside, was to make that transfer or not—in truth, the choice was whether I was going to surrender.

To surrender to my body, its fragility and needs.

To surrender to receiving help, a help dearly needed.

To surrender the story I had been holding around how the birth was meant to go.

To surrender to something that I could not, no matter how hard I tried, control.

To surrender to the transformation on offer.

So I made the choice. I surrendered. And my daughter arrived the next day in a sunlit wing of the hospital, both of us healthy and whole.

With a bit of time and work after the birth, I eventually found a pride in myself for my willingness to surrender. For the bravery that took.

But now, in this moment among the moss, I found an even deeper level.

I was proud of myself for making that choice, because when I surrendered, I invited in love.

Love for myself—for who I am beyond all stories.

For my body—in its vulnerability and need.

For my child—and the origin story she needed, a story that was meant to be told through me, but that I was not meant to dictate. 

For life, it’s rawness, it’s realness, it’s presence.

I surrendered to it, and life found me.  

Birth requires surrender because all big initiations require surrender, but in the end, I think, birth is designed to teach you about surrender because it’s preparing you for the even greater surrender that will come after.

Everything we must surrender to become a mother.

The daily surrendering—surrendering of plans, surrendering of meals, surrendering of schedules.  

And the even vaster landscape of surrender—surrendering who you are, where you hoped you’d be in life, what kind of mother you thought you’d become.

Every day there’s a choice. And over and over again we, as mothers, choose to surrender.

Because that surrender is an act of letting in love.

Again and again life will bring choices to our door. And each time, somehow, it will still be hard.

But as I sat on those rocks in the sunshine, clutching this card—this card I always hope to get, the card that says “love is here for you, you have not been abandoned”— I realized that the choice to become a mother is to choose this, a love that shows you, without compromise who you really are.

A love that shows you, with pain, with unutterable beauty, the truth of life.

A love that is bigger, more unknowable, more divine, and more out-of-your-control than anything you’ve ever experience before.

And that every time I make the choice to let go—letting go of the plans we made of getting to the park, letting go of trying to get her to eat the rest of her avocado toast, letting go of what kind of mother I thought I’d be—I surrender to something much greater than me.

I surrender to the love—moss-covered, sunlit, entire—that is here to hold me.