Ellen LaConte’s essay “The Next Things After Surrender” was published in The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2003) — Tenzin’s notes on this piece record it as a reprint from The Ecozoic Reader, the Center for Ecozoic Studies’ journal, though the specific original issue wasn’t confirmable in the Center’s public archive listing.
The piece traces her own relationship with a forest near her home in Connecticut, and how it changed her. She describes arriving as “a creature of words and compulsions,” reflexively trying to name and catalogue everything she encountered there — and gradually learning to set that impulse down. The turning point, in her account, came during a violent storm that broke apart her more romantic, tidy picture of nature; what followed, in her words, was that “wonder was the next thing after surrender.”
Her broader argument is that direct, embodied encounter with the natural world — not information about it — is what actually opens people to something like reverence. She frames the Western habit of naming and categorising the world as a way of holding it at a distance, and argues that letting go of that habit is what allows a felt sense of belonging to “the larger body of Earth.”
Read the full essay in Trumpeter, or browse the Center for Ecozoic Studies’ journal archive for more of their back catalogue.