Surrender Your Data

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Surrender your data, and I will give you wisdom. Empty your bank accounts, and let me show you value. Shut your eyes to entertainment, and open them to beauty. Unplug your high-speed connection and I will connect you to the eternal moment.

Come outside. There is a community waiting to stand in a circle with you and raise its voice. Come outside, and we will walk together to a place we have never been, but can remember. In such a place, the oldest things will be made new by the ripeness of your attention, and all the ancient stories we no longer know will be spoken in tongues of fire and emblazoned on your senses.

Have you tried to think your way into life, or out of it? How has that worked so far? But your merciful heart can forgive you, no matter how long it has been packed away. No matter how many times you denied it, didn’t hear, or pretended not to. That is the heart that brought you here. That is the same generous heart that has opened your life to this moment of choice, this palace of surrender, this precipice of love: your heart that was wild enough to be born into your animal form; your heart that will savage all your false domesticity, and sink its teeth into the flesh of human purpose; the heart that feeds on the blood of life; the heart that gives it back—twofold, tenfold, Godfold—renewed, re-vowed, in the rhythm of the drumbeat that invented time.

This is the choice that is both “now or never” and “now and always.” And all that’s asked of you is to say yes. You must say yes in a way you have not spoken any word before. In a way that breaks both language and silence. Say yes, the oldest prayer to the oldest god; the yes that created everything and holds us still; the yes that only you can say, and only you can hear; the yes that ripples through your body with hunger and pleasure and fear; the yes that will echo, and give you no rest, and will restore you beyond measure; the yes your soul has already spoken; the song that has already moved you; the yes of the name you are given at the gates of heaven, for that is where I am meeting you now.

That is the threshold you are crossing.

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Michael Quattrone is a singer, songwriter and seeker whose greatest curiosity and most profound learnings are sparked at the threshold between inner life and outward expression. You can learn more at Hearthfire.