What the Tree Asked Me

Sacrifice, surrender, and why alignment looks like luck from the outside

I was lying naked in the grass on the summer solstice. The sun was doing what solstice sun does — not warming exactly, but pressing, like it had something to say and wanted to make sure you felt it.

There was a tree nearby. Old. The kind of old that makes you quiet without deciding to be.

This isn’t the tree from this Summer Solstice, but instead a giant in the Costa Rican jungle.

And something in me — or something from it — surfaced a question I didn’t know I’d been avoiding:

Does success require sacrifice?

I stayed with that for a long time. Longer than felt comfortable. Because underneath the question was another one, sharper and less flattering:

Do people who had it easier just tell themselves a sacrifice story so they feel like they actually did something?

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Here’s what I’ve come to believe: we have the whole thing backwards.

We’ve inherited a story about sacrifice that’s really a story about transaction. Offer something up, receive something in return. Bleed for it. Earn it. The universe as cosmic accountant, tallying your suffering against your reward.

But that model has never held up in my experience. And I’ve had enough seasons now — of abundance, of dissolution, of building things from nothing — to have tested it.

What I’ve noticed is this: the moments I thought I was sacrificing for something were often the moments I was actually shrinking toward something. Adapting. Pruning desire to fit the available space. I wrote about this once — how I found myself saying I’d be content never seeing Paris. And in that moment I thought I was being flexible, even evolved. What I was actually doing was making my future smaller so it would fit inside someone else’s imagination.

That isn’t sacrifice. That’s self-abandonment in spiritual clothing.

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Real sacrifice — if we’re going to keep using the word at all — doesn’t feel like giving something up. It feels like refusing to give something up.

I’ve held boundaries in relationships that cost me everything warm and good between us. Standing in those moments, I wasn’t performing sacrifice. I wasn’t bargaining with the universe. I was refusing to fracture my own coherence to maintain someone else’s comfort.

The cost was real. The loss was real. But I didn’t sacrifice myself — I refused to.

And here’s where surrender comes in, because I think we’ve got that one backwards too.

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Surrender is not the same as giving up. It is not collapse. It is not defeat dressed in spiritual language.

Surrender is what happens when you stop trying to manage the outcome and trust the intelligence underneath it.

Lying in that grass, I could feel the difference in my body. There was a version of surrender that was soft and open — a releasing of grip, a willingness to be moved. And there was a version that felt like drowning — like resignation, like I was letting something happen to me rather than through me.

One came from coherence. The other came from exhaustion.

The tree didn’t ask me to suffer. It asked me to pay attention.

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So where does luck fit in?

I think luck is what alignment looks like from the outside.

When someone is moving in genuine coherence with who they are — when their choices, their values, their attention and their effort are all pointing in the same direction — things start to arrange. Doors open that weren’t visible before. The right person says the right thing at exactly the moment you were ready to hear it. Something you put down years ago turns out to have been exactly the preparation you needed.

From the outside, that looks like luck.

From the inside, it feels like coming home.

The sacrifice narrative gets constructed afterward — because we live in a culture that doesn’t trust ease. Ease feels unearned. Arrival without visible suffering feels suspect. So we reach back and find the hard moments and we say: see, I did pay for this. And sometimes that’s true. And sometimes it’s a story we tell to make our good fortune feel morally legible.

But here’s what I want to offer: what if ease is available on the other side of surrender, not sacrifice?

What if the variable isn’t how much you’ve given up, but how much you’ve stopped fighting what you actually are?

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I keep returning to something I wrote a while ago — that the truest form of divine union starts long before another person enters the scene. It begins with how we hold ourselves.

I think the same is true for everything we’re building. Every creative thing, every life thing, every becoming-thing.

It doesn’t begin with what you’re willing to give up.

It begins with what you stop pretending you can live without.

That’s not sacrifice. That’s not luck.

That’s just — finally — surrender.

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May Aje, Yoruba goddess of wealth and the power of the marketplace, the one who moves through women’s hands and women’s knowing, remind us that abundance is not earned through suffering. It is recognized through alignment. May she untangle the stories we’ve built around what we deserve, and leave us with only what’s true.

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