SURRENDER. DEVOTION. LOVE.

Apprenticeship to Love: The crooked path of marriage (May 5, 2026)

TODAY'S MEDITATION


First to surrender. To stop doing and pursuing and achieving and defending and all the things I've been trained for, as a man in this life. Surrender. But surrender to what?

Her tenderness.

This is the fruit I have neglected. The soft and nourishing fruit I have taken for granted, its sweetness seemingly forever.

Her tenderness is the silence that for too long I did not hear as a cry for tenderness in my turn. Her tenderness, only too seldom an anger at my carelessness...

...

I am different now, she tells me.

But, an oracle, I still struggle to hear her. I resist.

But I am beginning to hear, and feel, and know: this resistance is my (misplaced) gift of defending against the unknown. Because in the unknown I sense my vulnerability. Sensing this, I awaken the defensiveness that protects me —and that leads, inevitably, to suffering.

So, today, grateful to my practice and my still-growing awareness of who I am and how I may thrive as a man, I listen with ears unused to listening. I surrender, unused to surrendering to the silence. I struggle to hear.

...

I am used to hard wisdom. This soft and nourishing tenderness is awkward. I struggle, feeling drawn to surrender myself even more, and resisting. Nevertheless, I begin to hear the wisdom in her tender silence.

...

She calls me to be careful: to be full of care for what is offered, her vulnerability. This patient and care-ful way is how begin to know something unimaginable.

Her tenderness calls me to be gentle, soft with my words and with my voice, yet powerful enough to hold her and protect her. It's a different way of being powerful. I can apply my skills of defending where they are needed, holding her softness and her confusion in the face of the world. Its hard demands call me to be the man I am. I am making devotional my practice, with my breath and my listening...

TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS

🌀The goal of Bhakti yoga (the yoga of devotion) is to know god as the essence within ourselves and our true self always with god. (Anon)

🌀We practice loving god by loving another human being. (Olivia Harrison)

🌀Devotion is a practice of making an offering of yourself as Love to the one you love. (Nina Lombardo, Way of Devotion)

🌀By good fortune, I met my saint Guru
and I have found that the immortal creator is within the home my own self
and so I will always serve you and never be separated from you even for an instant....
(Guru Arjun, Mera Man Loche)

🌀The Conscious Warrior practices the cultivation of wonder and awe. (John Wineland)

🌀You're not like that now. (My beloved, my oracle)