The Art of Yielding
Editorial Reflection on co-curating Issue 4 of the Wellspringwords® Literary Anthology | Love, Surrendered.
To edit an issue like Love, Surrendered is to walk barefoot through the interior corridors of human emotion—soft, unguarded, and yet charged with the pulse of divine electricity. When I began journeying through this anthology, I wasn’t looking for love in its predictable expressions; I was searching for the tremor that happens when we surrender to love’s multiplicity. I wanted to hold space for the erotic and the sacred, for rage that burns as brightly as grace, for the kind of tenderness that feels like both a wound and a balm.
As a sexuality researcher and spiritual practitioner, I am fascinated by the intersections where desire meets devotion. In this issue, those intersections became the architecture of our curation. Each submission—whether a poem, essay, photograph, or illustration—was read not only for its craft, but for its pulse. I asked myself: Does this piece surrender? Does it allow itself to be seen, stripped of performance and pretense? Love, after all, is not a performance. It is an unmasking. It is an act of faith.
Some spoke of love as rebellion. Others wrestled with self-love, touching the edges of grief, shame, and redemption. And then there were the pieces that simply breathed love: the ones that felt like a quiet exhale after years of holding one’s breath. Those were the ones that stayed with me, long after I closed my laptop. My role as editor was not to tame these voices, but to listen. Listen to the rhythm of their confessions, to the cadence of their courage. I was reminded that surrender, in its purest form, is not submission to another, but an opening to truth. In that opening, language becomes an instrument of liberation.
This issue is an invitation to feel more deeply, to release the idea that love must always make sense, and to remember that surrender is not defeat but devotion. Love, in its surrendered state, teaches us to dissolve the borders between self and other, past and present, body and spirit. It reminds us that to love is to risk, to reveal, and ultimately, to return to the truth of who we are: beings made of longing, light, and the courage to yield.
In that yielding, we are free.
