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! 

E Pluribus Unum - Out of Many, One

Sometimes I look at the lives around me in the depths of reality today, the depths that come from the places I walk, I hear something quieter than the breeze. I hear a heartbeat that beats on a day that takes its place in a string of years and seasons that have created me to help shape the experience of today. I see the inspiration that struck wonder as it filled my eyes as a child and feel the shiver of joy that life is greater than my own experience. It sometimes shapes the spirit of the experience of a team, a country, a family, a friendship, that together we are one, and together we can be alive and make the future out of this. A future that can be harmonious if we dream and act together, if we hear the heartbeat of our neighbors and trust them to hear our own.

The trust and vulnerability in connection from community to friendship is fragile, yet precious as we feel or begin to sense the togetherness that helps us feel our embrace. It is difficult to know this depth even imagine when we have often known fear, despair, loneliness that has been bred from disappointment, discouragement, and exclusion. We know that exposure may take us further down the road of pain that we've known. So how can my life and your touch a life where we may see the hint of a smile? How can we build community and friendships when we have only been disappointed?

I think hope and heart can be grown from vision and feeling. Feeling that life isn't always the sunshine of smiles and laughter, but sometimes the numbness of past trauma haunting our present. Sometimes it is the continuous rainfall that floods our feelings and overwhelms us with discouragement and washes out the work we have done together. When a tragedy caused by human hands shatters our community, does it fracture everyone irreparably, or does it give birth to healing?
Healing that creates a scar to help us remember what we have gained, what we have grown, and taught by one life who's ripples still touch our lives as the memory of a life is carried always. We can sing and hold those close to us, and even those we have just met, to continue to build on memory and what we have.

These are the roots that can hold the soil where we grow together. Roots are the friendship and connection where we grow. Tears of remembrances and sunshine of continued hope and an embrace grow and help enrich the community that has blossomed from shared memory. Fear is real, but hope is true, where we hear the voices we have together. Voices from the soul that we feel growing from scars and wounds, and also from new beginnings, from forgiveness and from our lives shared with friends. There, barefoot, we can feel and hear the melody with the rhythm of our heartbeat join in community. The spirit of unity begins with one heart, one friendship that is shared over a lifetime, and one collective experience of unique perspectives and beginnings that are always the continuation of our growth.

Feeling the Heartbeat of our Lives

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart." Helen Keller

There is a rhythm that exists in each of us, beating like a drum, ringing like a bell, circulating and moving together with every living thing. What is felt with one heart can convey the human experience. The idea of the human experience may be cliche, but the experiences are real and felt in powerful ways. It was recently on a walk with a friend that I saw again how the actions of others ripple past the immediate interaction that took place in any given moment. The walk itself embodied this, and the understanding of human pain and joy that together in paradoxical ways form our lives. It is hard to understand how sorrow is part of the darkness that fuses angst, disbelief, and sadness to the moments that we wish we could hurry and leave behind. These adversities can be pivotal in helping us feel the warmth when cherished and held with a tapestry of connection.

In the heartbeat of life, we can think about the place we are living in. It isn't always happy or sad, angry or fearful. It usually is a mosaic of the feelings we have about our lives. Minutes become days and moments become memories. Life is a combination of such things. Walking freely with the wind with those who have chosen to encountered life's beauty with me alongside. I've found that in walking, conversation becomes more fluid as it incorporates the passage and change of time and life everywhere.

Laughter from the heart comes from the places we realize and know. As we understand our shared, collective experience as people, we live. Gathered together we can hold hands, for none of us has experienced what another has, but each of us may be listened to and cared for and in turn be a light of hope that beats together if we take the risk to step beyond our grudges and listen. Barefoot we feel what is shaping us, changing us. Barefoot we arise and walk over to the beginning of the next moment. May it be the wonder that makes us cry with hope that together we can build something for the future of our lives and those we love. So it may be these feelings that hold us to the moment to create, shape, learn, live.

Smiles That Change the World

"I say why all the loneliness and why all the fear,  if it's up to me there'll be none of that here."
Joe Crookston

A smile offers a little bit of sunshine that is not only lasting, it can very often begin or create a connection that can spread to all of us. When words cannot be found for appreciation, comfort, delight, pleasure, excitement, and often hope, a smile can be the expression of our feelings for such moments. It is in gladness the present becomes real, and the present becomes our life forming experience that changes our lives; often for the better. Like a birdsong evokes the first breath of dawn, a smile can be that instant where darkness starts to fade into the light.

It is this mystery that cannot be held, even for a moment. Like water running through our hands, we have the moment to create something that is for the moment. Smiles offer a consoling, knowing welcome, an agreement in unison, or a sign that the fearful have seen a light at the end of the tunnel. Even when despair lingers and confusion swirls into our minds or causes chaos in our lives, a smile is that breath of fresh air that becomes understanding. Understanding that there is more than all this sorrow, loneliness and fear.

Joe Crookston sings from his soul, evoking his desire to leave a better world for the generations that will inherit what we leave behind. He doesn't want what he has seen others or maybe even himself face. That's why he sings and asks why we have all the anger and greed that are the seeds of war and poverty. The injustice that tear us apart rather than bring us together can begun to be reconciled with a smile, with a seed of hope from a hand of welcome and embrace.

Yesterday in becoming better acquainted with one of my neighbors, I felt his warmth not from his words, but from the combination of words of friendship and the gentleness of his smile. Once affected by a smile, we are never the same, we feel it in the roots of our heart as we know our lives matter that we too can take the smile we received, and offer it to another as night becomes day and the moment becomes ours briefly to create a way of healing out of this fear and into jubilation and peace.

The sunlight of dawn reflecting off the water as its light spreads everywhere; like a smile spreads hope.

A Story Told Is A Life Shaped

One of the first gifts we are given is our voice. It is with our voice that our individual place in the history of humanity is understood by others and hopefully, by our selves. With the voice we're given, we forge an identity that becomes our very sense of what we're going to bring to life over the years we walk across this planet. As children, we are often exposed to the ways others live, the environments of our world, and the people who are our family and our neighbors. It is in a story we find others, we find life, and maybe most important, we find what we connect to.

Growing up, I heard stories that were illustrated by people acting out the actions that tell something about life and as I fell asleep while they were being read by the tender baritone that my dad was given to share with others. During this time, I connected to music that had lyrics formed into stories told as they were sung to a guitar strumming and a banjo twanging. It was the music that had its roots in the soil of gardens, its range across the heart of humanity's experience as the sun rose and set, and that found me connecting to others that are part of life with me.

In a story, we can grow with characters, hear the rhythm that pulses daily in our hearts, recognize our dilemmas and struggles, and continue to ask questions that lead to discovery. We tell stories to children so they can expand the images they have of life in their minds. Imaginations are formed through what we tell them through expressive, vivid, imagery that broaden a perspective and permit a new understanding to form and later be shared to the collective experience that is humanity.

Once a story ends, our place that we put in it, doesn't have to. A part of the story can light a flame or plant a bulb that we can kindle or nurture until it becomes a deep inspiration. We can sometimes only see other parts of life through story. In words spoken we can hear a story in harmony with illustration or in the rhythm that connects our lives to others.  The stories in our hearts from families, friends, other cultures, give meaning and color to the very purpose of life. Their essence touch our soul, reach our minds, and give depth to what we reach for when we sing together to unite as one people in a shared, similar experience, or awareness of what we can do to share life and a light through for each other.

In the story, we see the journey becoming the pages we illustrate. How we use our voice allows us to tell our story as we travel together. We need not tell the whole story of our lives. We can tell the parts that make us who we are, where we are, as we become alive as we relate and understand in new ways in new light whether it's firelight, flashlight, fluorescent light, sunlight, moonlight, or candle light. This is the light of a story, no matter how dark, that we begin to speak out of as our voice becomes part of our stories.

A story can be our bridge to the meaning of our lives built from imagination,
connection to reality, and new understanding.

Connecting Through Walking

All over the world people walk to get from place to place. If they can't walk, they can get from place to place with people who are walking along with them. Walking isn't something that can last a moment because it is something that gets us from place to place over a period of time, but it is something that brings us to experience places, people, and history in ways that are often transcendent.

People have walked on the moon, to represent their opposition to injustice, to bring attention to something that afflicts humanity, to grow deeper in a sense of spirituality or faith, to bond with a friend, family member, or partner, and often to be connected to something or someone important to them. Though many of us cannot walk, we can still experience its liberating power through the movement we make through life. The fluid motion of movement draws one into life and can transform someone's experience of their day or life. Walking along with someone in crisis or sharing in their company can be a way to tune into part of someone else's life, in their movements or even in their feelings when expressed in strides or other means. It brings people closer, more in touch with themselves, and often with each other, and becomes a common bond that has been forged because of what has been shared.

To me, walking is an experience that is close to the heart as it connects me to my soul by feeling the parts of life all around me. When walking with another person, I can hear them better, because I am doing something with them and this sometimes helps me connect to my own humanity. When walking alone, in sadness or in grief, I can feel the larger world reconnecting with me, and showing me more of the universe. In the same vein, I can often feel the parts of life expressed by what lies around me, through the hope expressed in a colorful mural that I pass, trees growing along a neighborhood street, the sadness of a neglected area that is just passed through, and joys of laughter I hear in people playing, dancing, and living near me. It is just a soulful expression of life to move and feel my senses feel and reach to this place of life.

In walking, I can challenge myself to know myself more, to grow through exertion, or to belong to a community or a friendship. It is the greater feeling of joining others in movement, hopefully forward, that allows for me to experience who it is that I am, and where it is that I want to be, amongst the many sights, sounds, and complexities of life.

People walking from place to place in 30th Street Station in Philadelphia

Water Reaching The Depths

Water flows along brooks and rests in tarns in mountains that reach into the sky. Its captivating power has a way of connecting with us, perhaps because so much of our bodies contain this mysterious substance. As I listen to water flowing or pattering on the fly of a tent, it amazes me how the natural sound reaches me where I need to be soothed, and allows me to reflect on the movement of life and the wideness of this planet. 

In many ways, folk melodies strummed from a guitar, mandolin, banjo, or plucked from a fiddle have a remarkably similar effect on me. As the melodies join the harmonies of a vocalist singing from the raw, evocative roots that touch the heart, and reverberate within the soul with memory and melancholy. Such music can move me to tears either from sadness or from recollection, and even profound joy linking the waters of life to the mellow richness of a folk guitarist singing to the cultures and to the bowels of the earth. 

These melodies and waters form a well for our spirit to be reached, and maybe shared. In this well, the depths of our dreams, our histories, our relationships can be drawn and bring us together or more in touch with ourselves. Why are we drawn to waterfalls, rapids, and crashing waves? The fast movement of water is like the fast movement of life and cannot be slowed, but can be savored and experienced with it's full force and blast of emotion and heart that makes us feel alive. As the melodies reach us, and inspire us, we can form them to mean what they will for our lives. From splashing in puddles and laughing as we dive deeper into the salty waters of the ocean discovering the soul of the earth to rising again as we grow more aware of what this life brings by wading in and embracing what is there. 

Niagara Falls - Summer 2010