We deserve love, but we also must learn to accept love. Our happiness depends on how well we bear our responsibility. Our prayers are manifesting, but the actualization waits on us to allow life to unfold. Because of our own self-denigration, we struggle accepting love, wealth, and even the possibility of peace. Through surrendering we walk a divine path.
Surrendering is the ultimate test of faith, for we trust our work will produce a wonder-filled life. I was working as a Teacher’s Assistant, and it took everything in my power to surrender. It took everything I had to relinquish my ego, and rebuild myself after losing my yoga studio. Joy seemed so unattainable, happiness seemed so far away. And, for a moment, I settled into the belief that enlightenment was reserved for bald men in villages. I let go of time, and remained present, discipline, and patient. We must love ourselves, and let go of all attachments–Henry Miller says:
To love! To surrender absolutely, to prostrate oneself before the divine image, to die a thousand imaginary deaths, to annihilate every trace of self, to find the whole universe embodied and enshrined in the living image of another! Adolescent, we say. Rot! This is the germ of the future life, the seed which we hide away, which we bury deep within us, which we smother and stifle and do our utmost to destroy as we advance from one experience to another and flutter and flounder and lose our way.
We must reflect on our lives in order to see how far we’ve came, for we seem to be so forgetful. Most times we’ll see that we became everything we set out to be. One must work to create our destiny, and have faith in the strange series of synchronicities guiding our hearts–Henry Miller says:
Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him. No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance. Destiny is what you are supposed to do in life. Fate is what kicks you in the ass to make you do it.
To surrender we must live for the day. We must embrace the moment happening before us entirely, and allow the complete transformation necessary for wholeness and greatness. One must accept that we can only do our work honestly, joyfully, and purposefully while leaving the rest for the universe. Henry Miller speaks on the most difficult thing to admit:
I wanted to die; I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for. When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance. I am very certain now that, as I said therein, if I truly become what I wish to be, the burden will fall away. The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one’s whole being, is that you alone control nothing.
One has to permit people to become desperate, to become wholly lost, that only then are they ready for the right word, only then can they avail themselves of the truth. To withhold it then is a crime. But to nurse them along is a worse crime. And there is where much of the conflict centers, about that point. The human instinct to spare the other person his agony (which is his means of salvation, in any sense of the word) is a fallacious instinct. Here the subtle temptations, the vicious and insidious ones, because so confused and entangled, enter in. On this so-called human plane it is the ego which commands — often in the most amazing disguises. The temptation to be good, to do good, gets us all some time or other. It’s the last ruse, I feel, of the ego.
At 75, Miller was enjoying belated success in his native land and living at his new, very pleasant California home when he fell in love with a magnetic 27-year-old Japanese jazz singer, newly arrived in America, who was playing at a piano bar. This book contains his letters to Hoki, who, for three years, was the fifth Mrs. Miller. The marriage was the usual Miller crucifixion, with Miller leading himself by the nose directly up to the cross, providing hammer and nails, and reduplicating his childhood with a cold mother and his famed second marriage to taxi dancer June Mansfield (the “Mona” of the Tropics novels).
Before marrying Miller, both wives made a living by entertaining men, and after marriage, often disappeared evenings, while Miller willingly deluded himself about their actions and agreed to their stories and evasions. With Hoki he knew even before marriage that he might be getting into cold water, since she married him to evade deportation and with the agreement that he would not force her to have sex. Apparently, their marriage remained unconsummated physically, a fact she broadcast in Japanese gossip rags, much to his disgust.
As Henry Miller learned with a vengeance, some Japanese never speak of love. “Never once have you shown me any love, any affection, any consideration—not even the respect due me as your husband. You have gone your own sweet way, doing only what pleased you, expecting devotion but showing none yourself. A spoiled, discontented child, thoroughly selfish, and acting as if she were a prisoner in her own home. . . But you show me no appreciation—only boredom, discontent. You can’t bear to remain home for an evening. If you do, it is only to cut your toe nails, shampoo your hair or some such nonsense.”
Follow this essay up with Henry Miller speaking about marriage and love.
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