Letni pod vodou (underwater summer photo) via Wikimedia Commons

“I am rooted, but I flow.” ~Virgina Woolf

Surrender is softening your edges enough to touch down into solitude.

Allowing yourself to lie supine in the summer grass wearing cutoff jean shorts and sticky sunblock on an August Wednesday, with your left arm bent like a reclining cactus and your right arm lying outstretched across your chest.  Palm resting on your heart– feeling the patience of your own delicate heartbeat.

You sit there and ponder a blue, cloud blown sky. While your mascara makes little eyelash footprints on top of thirty-something-years-worth of squint-laden eye creases, behind finger-printed  sunglasses,

and two clattering subway trains pass each other on a rusty bridge above a river, moving towards one another on separate tracks at equal speed in opposite directions. And you allow yourself to both not know, or need to know, what speed they must be going. The question of that word problem that floated around you in calculus is suddenly set free to roam, soaring up to rest somewhere in between the silent pile of cumulus clouds.

Water moves in front of you like rippling silken glass and you sink a little deeper into the poetic feeling of stillness that exists between moments

Content to be here, both knowing and not needing to know it All.
Here in the midst of your own bare feet and chipped earthen brown toenail polish, the sound of humming 4:33pm bike tires hover, and joggers strum the pavement behind you,

While you gaze out beyond your own 2 30-something-year-old knees that have bent to catch you a million and one times already, but have never broken and let you fall.
And when you sit up, before you go, in an offer of gratitude for this moment, you pause to catch a glimpse of softness reflected back to you in the recognition of your own afternoon shadow.

The light and its contrasting counterpart making each other knowable.