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Pondering Fear

3/26/2016

FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Kathy Stiffney

Pondering fear
To know fear is to tune in to a most primal emotion. Fear at its best when acted upon appropriately protects. Fear at its worst is an insidious curse moving one to develop actions that indiscriminately destroy.

Our bodies respond to the most dangerous situations through an instinctive response to fear. Our minds may take that emotion and twist it, manipulate it, or expand it with faulty assumptions beyond what is truly dangerous. Unless we are aware, present to what that fear truly represents, we may seek to protect something that is not the threat we think it is.

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Worry is the niggling finger (or maybe the middle finger!) joined to the hand of fear. Worry may be the way that leads to creating a false fear. I may turn the hand into a limp apathy or the readied fist. In between somewhere is the hand of help and creativity. Acknowledging the worry, exploring it, expressing and letting it be a conscious energy enables one to make decisions that take worry energy to its healthy conclusion.

Fearsome things….. using both the mind and the soul to let them be what they are…..become fearless guides.

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fEAR

3/4/2016

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FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Marlene Sarle

James Hollis, in the winter 2016 edition of Parabola, challenges us to love our fate, amor fati. It seems to me that amor fati might have something to say about our deepest, most profound, and troubling fears. This may be easier if the verb were changed to face our fate, accept our fate, embrace our fate. Loving our destiny is probably a lifelong challenge. “Why me?” we often ask. “What did I do to deserve this?”
This is difficult. Are Syrian refugees able to love their fate, or even accept it? If they could, would it reduce the fear that seems reasonable in such a situation? Hollis explains love of fate by describing it as living the life we have been called to live.
   He calls amor fati “a heroic submission to the gods— ‘not my will but Thine,’” which is how Jesus faced his great fear, his call to the cross.  Hollis quotes Nikos Kazantzakis: “The triumph of Jesus is not over death, as his followers believe, but his capacity to accept his fate…” I don’t know that that ‘love of’ equates to ‘submission to’. Maybe it does, if submission comes from a heart of love and trust. “Perfect love casts out fear.”
Might, then, amor fati ameliorate the fears that haunt us and daunt us? Our fate is often wrapped up in the very things that we fear. We must confront these fears to embrace our calling. We are phobic of public speaking, and our destiny is to become an attorney.  We are terrified of flying and find ourselves in a career that requires extensive travel. Fear of failure torments us. Can the understanding that this is our calling help us to do the hard work of overcoming our fear so that we may fulfill what is ours to do? If we can move from resistance, rejection, even hate, anger, and bitterness of the life we have been given to live, might we be better able to find relief from fears?
Hollis describes Camus’ insight into the Sisyphus myth, who suggests that Sisyphus chooses to push that stone back up the hill each and every time it rolls back down because, rather than fighting his fate, he accepts it. He achieves amor fati. “Sisyphus is truly free through his willing submission.” If willing submission to our fate sets us free, that must include freedom from fear.  He no longer need fear the stone rolling down and crushing him or the nonstop torture of pushing the stone.
This sounds simple. That does not make it easy. To love, even simply to accept, one’s fate takes commitment—to truth, to love, to growth and individuation. It is a lifelong task. It is the task of fulfilling one’s destiny.
If we can approach amor fati, it may enable us to see the bigger picture of our lives from a new perspective, to trust that the gods who direct our destiny have our best interest in mind. We cooperate with the gods, or we wrestle against the gods. The Bible reminds us often to “fear not”. Cooperating with the gods includes accepting their instruction to “fear not”.

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Shortly after the Paris bombing...

3/4/2016

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FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Joan Yoder Miller

Shortly after the Paris bombings and the aftermath of surrounding fear, the idea surfaced to offer all of us a chance to write and read about fear out of the Apple Farm container. Weekly we have received someone's perspective on fear. There are still a few more to be sent.

I dropped the ball two weeks ago when I needed to make a fast trip home (from Florida) due to the health of my mother. She died on February 25. She was 94; someone who seemed to truly grow old in the Helen Luke sense of things. Still, she often said, "This is not my favorite time of life." She had a close-knit family and retained a youthful vigor that was astonishing to persons who first met her, sometimes sitting with one leg tucked under her like a teenager. When it got clear last week that her body would no longer support her, she made the decision to move toward death and decided when the moment was right to do so. The mood in her hospital room was bright, even joyful. Those close to her would say, "You are not afraid, are you?" She would respond with twinkling eyes, "I am not afraid. I don't know how it will be. And I wonder if I will find those I love. But no, I am not afraid."

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...it is in part by our response to the great stories of the world that we too can begin to find, each of us this individual story expressing the symbolic meaning behind the facts of our fate and behind the motives that determine the day-to-day choices of our lives. -Helen Luke, The Inner Story