FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Amy Carpenter-Leugs
From it's earliest appearances in our lives, fear can take over our bodies so completely – it's difficult to remember that we can have a conversation with it. As a child, one of my household chores was to walk our day's leavings out to the compost pile, often in the deep dark of the country night. The unknown became palpable in rustling noises, in the way the ground seemed to bump and rise unpredictably under my feet, in how the ice-glazed snow pushed up my pantlegs and scraped at my bare skin. By the time I had dumped the coffee grounds and orange peels behind the barn, I was ready to run flat-out back to the house. Sometimes I controlled the impulse and made myself walk. Sometimes I ran, but then caught my breath and composed myself before I walked inside. We often don't want to admit the fluttering wings in our chest, the feeling that we must hide, run, or escape. If we can't act on those sensations, then we feel the helpless shutdown – the pit in our stomach, the lack of air, the feeling we may faint. In this dark small place, we experience with our warm blood the cold fact that nobody leaves this world unscathed, much less alive. FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Donice Wooster
The Indo-European root of the word “fear” is one of the variations of “per-“. Growing from that root, along with words having to do with fear, there is also the word “reverence”. Perhaps the last vestige of the link of reverence to fear in our time is the phrase “fear of God”, implying awe. It makes me wonder if fear and reverence are two sides of the same coin, opposites held in tension in the psyche. Noticing what we fear might also tell us something about what we revere (and vice versa). Fear and reverence both acknowledge the power of something. Fear often has a physical component, linking psyche and body. When we sense danger, our lower brain kicks in, adrenaline flows and our bodies want to fight or run. Fear in a dream often wakes us up, literally. Fearful dream images give us a chance, through active imagination or art or writing, to find out what the fear wants – to what does it want to draw our attention? I am remembering a dream in which the dreamer was on a landing, caught between wanting to go to the basement to follow someone and waiting for someone upstairs. The dreamer felt paralyzed by fear in the dream, believing the person in the basement was in danger but feeling unable to move. As the dreamer worked with the dream in active imagination, the dreamer was able to walk down the stairs, out of the grip of the fear, and then help the person in the basement with a task that signaled an end of something. This work with the dream led from fear to reverence. (I am making the details sketchy, and have the dreamer’s permission to share it.) By working with the dream in active imagination, the dreamer was able to explore what the fear was about and experience the lessening of its power as the dreamer took action. That would not always be what fear wants, but it seemed to be in this case. Fear is universally felt but individual in its meaning. As individuals, accepting the work of bearing fear, working with frightening images that come to us and holding the tension between fear and reverence is a worthy task on its own, and might help to ease the burden of fear in the collective. Fears follow this developmental path in children and youth: 1. Fear of the unknown – mitigated by curiosity 2. Fear of being alone – mitigated by bonded relationships 3. Fear about the body (fear of haircuts, going down the drain, injuries) 4. Fear about the self – am I worthy? Am I normal? Am I enough? 5. Fear of the voice of conscience – Am I ethical? Is this right? These fears emerge in children as they develop the cognitive and emotional capacity to feel and name them. For the rest of our lives, events both inner and outer can precipitate one or more of these fears again. By attending to the images that accompany fear we can discover the fear’s meaning for us now. FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Sara Sage
I’m sharing some thoughts using the word FEAR as an acronym for several components of it here. I hope this encourages some personal reflection for you, too. Feeling Many of us experience fear as a challenging feeling. It can be scary to be scared. It often feels very vulnerable and uncomfortable. It is so easy to be scared by unpredictable events in the world, threats, uncertainties, and our own thoughts and growth process. Many people get angry or take immediate actions that are often not helpful to avoid feeling afraid. Yet – we are clearly “hardwired” to experience fear, and fear has valuable information for us. FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Don Troyer
Outer fears we’re all familiar with. What with global warming, mass shootings, terrorism, nuclear threats, and entrenched tribal hatreds, we are so inundated by the ubiquity of bad news that the risk is that these fears become banal, so anesthetized by repetition so that we are all at risk of apathy or manipulation by the latest political voice. But what about inner Fear, the ever-present fear of Silence? We all carry this Mother of all fears, the Void, with its dread consort Father Death behind the curtain. There are two basic responses to this Fear. The apophatic via negativa of turning into it, sitting with its gaping emptiness, in the Cloud of Unknowing, alongside Merton, T.S. Eliot, the Buddhists, and the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Or the kataphatic way of responding with word and image-making. This way recognizes the ultimate value of our calling to make words, music and images to incarnate our experience. The Word becomes flesh and lives among us. While these are often seen as opposites they, I believe, are intimately related hidden partners. The pleroma and the animating symbol are a pair! Helen Luke, Thomas Merton and Carl Jung, each in their own distinctive ways repeatedly entered (or dropped into, or found themselves overtaken by) the Silence to listen and attend. Out of this emerged their writings, be it essays, journals, autobiography or The Red Book, and their generative relationships. Without the integrity of silence, words become noise. Pan intrudes. Without the issue of the word, silence can evade the human necessity of incarnation and can remain in suspended gestation. So Fear and Silence: can’t live with them, can’t live without them. They keep us listening to hear and dare to be The Word. 1/10/2016 DT |
...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 Archives
February 2021
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