Sarah Blondin is a free weekly newsletter. If you love it, consider supporting it financially. For $7/mo, you’ll gain access to my monthly Q&A and my serial-Folding In. The work I create here is reader-supported, hence the lack of ads and sponsors. Thank you!
I’ve been thinking a lot about fear lately. The ways it can change and shape us. The ways it is present for us, how subtle and gripping it can be. Do we bother to confront it? Or sit idly by as it sweeps through us? Do we have a safe way to engage with it, as to soften and disarm it? Or are we unaware of how and where it lives in us?
I’ve sat very close to my fear. These last few years especially. I know where it lives in me and how it hides. I know what I do when it arrives, and I’ve continued to watch it change and shift under my awareness. I learn something new almost daily about my fear and am resigned to it never going away. I know as long as I am alive, I will know fear. So long as we are evolving and adapting to an ever-shifting climate and world, we will know fear. So long as we are going through life-threatening disease together, and finding ways to unify our decisions, so long as we are becoming mothers and fathers, so long as we are growing our capacities and offering parts of ourselves to the world, so long as we are groaning toward change, and helping everyone to their feet, so long as we are are seeing, listening, healing, repairing, redeeming, rectifying, creating, dreaming, becoming, breathing, being born and dying, we will each know fear. It took me a long time to get to the place where I could say: I’m okay with that. I wish my fear away every time it arrives, but having lived the last few years, we each have, I have found something changing in me. I can feel a bold and fearless YES screaming up from my feet and out my mouth. I am finding my: Yes, to this place of suffering and the beauty thread through it. My yes, to life.
Suffering was what Ram Dass called “spiritual sandpaper.” The sharp grit has the potential to awaken, inspire, and invoke the deeper you living dormant inside you. We may be up to our knees in the mud right now, being rubbed raw, but we are finding each other through it, sitting together on a Tuesday, learning to look at our fear and change how it lives in us. Smiling, if only for a moment, because we know we are not alone.
This piece is one of the many contemplations of fear I’ve written, it is the most recent:
“Unexamined fear stays fear. One-dimensional and insipid. An opaque hand over our eyes. A veil that stops us from seeing and moving. But examined fear, fear looked at from all sides, is fear understood and demystified. Fear is inextricably linked with the unknown mystery. The stone foundation that all our feet stand on. There is no escaping the anxiety that we each experience in our days or sleepless nights. The persistent presence of the unknowable leaves many of us wrung and unsettled. But this ubiquitous fear can become somewhat of a friend.
Fear is something I am very intimate with. It has been the hand on my shoulder most days. Sometimes the closed hand around my throat. I have acted in ways that preserved this fear by collapsing in on myself into prolonged suffering. By hiding. By moving slowly and barely at all some days. I have listened to its stories and thought it wise, and I have fallen many times into anguish so dark it has threatened my survival. I have let it make a home in me and allowed it to make me change. I have felt it as crippling pain and tightness across my ribs. As wound ligaments in my hips and relentless metal noise, that has pushed me into many a tight corner. But watching with such closeness over the years, I have entered a conversation with this fear. I have sat and listened to its stories and found there are very few. It says only one thing in many different ways, but it can reduce to the single sentiment: I am afraid of life, and I am afraid of death.
My friend, a doctor, says he can see with each patient the way they have chosen to live their lives. The habits stacked on top of their bodies. He can see how their choices have made them crooked or labored in their physicality. He knows the clack of a person lost in the confusing churn of their thoughts. Transmitted on their voice, history spelled out in tone. He can sense who they've been by the space they inhabit. A story etched across the skin of their face, in their living and breathing. We are a culmination of small steps taken. Our bodies are built of choices, made one after another, over years and years. Each one makes its unique mark on our being. In the way, we move. In the way, we speak. In the way, we stand. We are built of a story and carry it with us into every room. Fear has contorted most of us into a shape we do not love. The bright side is it’s mailable. One we can mold if we are willing to get a bit uncomfortable.
The antidote is confrontation. A full-bodied turning toward the cyclone and acting in direct opposition of its tyranny. To remove the barbed hook of our fear, we must, with as little trepidation as possible, throw ourselves toward the very thing it is protecting- our life!
I have made sure to act in courageous ways that make me forget the tiny voice inside me that does not want to live and does not want to die. Some days that means I write what I’m afraid to, I lean into the love I am avoiding, and others it means simply getting out of bed and putting on my shoes to go for a walk. And with each choice I make to vote for something greater than my fear, I find myself falling open into an embrace so wide I remember some faraway love that is so large, I am swallowed by it. I remember I am not my fears, but a buoyant awakened thing moving on a zephyr of grace. A choir exalts and rings through my ears, turning me into one single musical note.
I woke the other morning to find a lake full of dead moths. Stretching out in all directions, thousands of translucent wings lay open and floating on the holy blue. They in the night must have followed the blinding light of the full moon reflecting off the water and, like moths do to flame, flew feverishly into the embrace of their death. Thousands of them were held motionless on the glass surface of the water. Suspended in time in their devotional trance.
This will be my invocation: to follow the light as wholeheartedly as those moths. To arc my wings toward the fire, no matter the risk of death. To run in the direction of my annihilation. To not be afraid of losing all of me to the flight. Wholly surrendered to my fate: I am alive, and so too will die. I will not freeze in fear or stay at the shore. I will abandon any notion of safety and comfort. I will barrel toward illumination. Always.
For one thing, is for sure, if we do not leave the bank, we will not find what carries us, and we will not know the risk of exposing the indestructible in us. We will never know the joy of losing ourselves in our YES- our yes to life. Our yes to death. Our yes to walking on this earth with all the unknowable at our feet. Forever refusing to be ruled by the small story living in each of us, for we know well, to be a serf to that story means we refuse to move. And to refuse to move means we live a half-alive life. And to live a half-alive life is to live every day, a small death. Better to take giant leaps into and toward the warm glow beaconing to us. Wings splayed. Floating on a brilliant body of water. Drunk off the iridescent moon.
The moths were not flying to their death but spiraling toward something that felt like home. Fear or no fear, they were following a longing to touch truth.”
Fear is not meant to harm us, but it often does. The mercy behind our being maimed by our fears is if lucky, it startles us into wakeful presence. We learn as I have just started, to risk it all no matter its story. Life wants to be lived by and through us. I want to know this fully, and so do you. Let your fear get close. Let it instruct you. Behind its walls is a heart bursting to touch its life.
May we examine and get curious about our fears. May we look to find what light it may be concealing. May we make friends with its presence, and understand its relationship with the mystery. May we strengthen our fortitude and choose as wisely, and boldly as we can when our fears are present. May our choices and habits become a body of great wisdom, compassion, and reverence. May we do it all together, with our eyes open, and hearts reaching, forever reaching, to touch truth.
“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.” -Pema Chodron
Folding In 4