Essay: “The Next Things After Surrender” — Ellen LaConte

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.”

Ellen-Laconte on deep ecology

Essay: “The Next Things After Surrender” — Ellen LaConte