About Fear

Today is the first day of the first full week of the new year according to the Gregorian calendar that is commonly used personally and professionally in my life. As a new year in 2014 has taken hold, so to has old habits that return showing that a new year doesn't keep life continuous in the patterns that have begun in moments passed. The new year had me thinking about fear, the emotion that makes it hard to accept any part of reality. With so many perspectives and biases, wounds and scars, histories, and other experiences woven into our interactions and our experiences, fear is easy to feel. 

The questions I asked myself what it would take to live my life fully, especially if I wanted it to be unique. I kept coming back to fear. It has been a persistent feeling that I've noticed to be quite a contagion no matter the severity of the circumstance. Fear of failure, inadequacy, the end of the world, open spaces, death, rejection, being loved, elevators, heights, snakes, the dark. I could go on with my list and risk sounding like I want to start one of those psychiatrist booths that Lucy van Pelt is always using to get Charlie Brown out of a nickel, but that's not what this is about. There is something about fear that provokes people to do things they wouldn't otherwise dream of doing. I don't think there is a way to keep fear out of our lives, but I do believe there are ways to be aware of it so it doesn't influence us in ways that risk us from living life fully. 

While I cannot speak for anyone's experiences but my own on this blog, I will share that thinking about the future with some consternation and apprehension can make the present moment more tense and less freeing. I prefer to be a bit of a free spirit with some conscious thought included in what I do, think, and say in order to gain different perspectives on what parts of life I may be thinking about.  If I read something in the news that had a decidedly grim outlook and I thought there may be hope, I would probably choose the side of hope. Now hope may feel a bit naive, and maybe it is premature to think that way without knowing all sides to a certain situation, but if I were to to take the time to do that, I would find so many different thoughts and experiences that both validate and negate my own that it would be hard to really know what to think after that. 

So I have taken some time to rest with uncertainty, to accept the paradoxes of life and death as part of this universe, this life, this world that I've been traveling along for 24 years. I can be afraid or I can let life be a wonder of delight and surprise that can both be superficial and of depth to making meaning, purpose, and goodness from the acts of kindness and laughter that appear in the midst of coping with the hardscrabble realities that pockmark our lives and help us direct our conscious efforts. To live without fear is to not be afraid, but to live without fear controlling our entire lives.  Happy New Year! 

Dogwood and Trillium

   

With crickets chirping to one another through the trees and cornfields nearby, life is happening and changing in every moment. Where is the flower that was here yesterday? What will I look like tomorrow? How can I overcome this habit I've had for years? Does this moment mean anything on this lazy summer day?

If I strive to be present and mindful of the very minute I am in a certain location, I'll recognize that the passing days continue to form weeks that gradually multiply into months and years. What was once a stem, is now a bud, and what is a bud today will be a flower tomorrow.  If by taking this moment, and realizing it's potential, I can change or grow where I've seen something promising sprout out of the darkest ground. Overcoming this darkness takes the courage to break free from a familiar place and further reach unfamiliar terrain that can nourish and challenge the growth occurring.

How can I be still enough to enjoy and experience what I need to in this moment to take that next step? As reminded by a teacher this morning, I cannot leap forward without taking time to be in the place I am presently. Being mindful of the crickets chirping, the honest place I am in, will pull me back to all the swirling activity that has and will happen if only I am ready to take this opportunity to live and create the moment I'm living in.

A Path For the Heart

The road less traveled is often quoted when one is proud of the unique path they have chosen. To blaze a trail or follow the way with less footprints often gives us a journey with a more complex landscape. If life were a musical composition, we could either follow the melody line or expand on what is simple and elaborate on the tones and tempos as the music notes rise and fall. This is more than taking a short cut to make something easier, this is taking a path from what opens our lives to creativity, connection, and challenge that helps us live a little bit more and understand that sometimes it is the path to hearing our hearts and our  history.

We often have to take a detour from the path we were taking because life is always under construction. The detour can also be our choice as Robert Frost's poem explains. When we take off our shoes and creep forward towards the frontiers of our comfort levels, we become pioneers discovering how surprisingly beautiful a life can be lived when it isn't always planned out. To some this might be wanderlust, others improvisation, and without both we cannot chart new waters in our lives.

Improvisation. As a part of art or comedy or music, I think part of it comes from an inner restlessness that comes from being tired of the same old routines or in other words, boredom. Another part probably comes from the reaches of the human spirit - exhaustion, terror, rage, inspiration, speechless experiences that can only be evoked through the stirrings of the soul that come out in art. It seems to be the way of creativity, the way of reaching into the rhythm of one's body or one's community and moving forward in response to these pulls that guide us down our own road less traveled.

Sometimes interruptions create these forks in the road that give us the choice of how fast our lives are going. Life always looks like it's going fast when looking through the photo album and through the rear view mirror, but that's because we're seeing all that has happened all at once rather than over the time it took for us to experience these things. I'm not saying we have to blow all over the place like a balloon in the wind, but I'm thinking that if we release some of our routine to our senses, our surroundings and feel our soul take hold, we can begin to find the beating drum of our heartbeat. With that we can possibly realize the human possibility where peace and harmony based on each of our souls, pieces of the diverse puzzle of humanity can be real as the riffs we play from our lives.

balloon in the wind

fun with photography

your own path by water

or land