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!
Worry// Staying close.
This morning, as on so many mornings, I am sitting at a boundary. A berm where I find myself attempting to understand the nuances of a certain fear or worry-the visitors with multitudes of faces and imitations. Worry appears all the more frequently since becoming a mother to my two sons. The depth of love I feel for these beings wakes in me the unshakable fear of the coming loss. This beauty I somehow have been blessed to call my own for now- these stones of light glinting around me, these warm smiles and arms, these hearts of gold beating here with me- I am going to lose no matter how hard I deny. I struggle daily to swallow the thought of this inevitable fate.
I have studied this fear, as I do all my fears to try and understand what we do when we are afraid. I see how I abandon my life and run from the places and bodies that hold my love. When tripped by fear or worry, I distance myself either physically or emotionally. I’m in the room but lost somewhere in an invisible world. Home but with no lights on. It is how we behave when we become triggered by something. A feeling or experience comes into our lives, and we run or react, withdraw or intensify. If we observe our moments, many of them are setting off a triggered response in us. The more indirect the trigger, the harder it is to study our pattern, but sometimes there are enormous ones that send us flying blindly like a spinning top into all corners of the room. These, which dislocate us, are what I consider heightened opportunities for turning confusion into clarity.
I read somewhere, "when the afflictions of negative emotions are blazing like fire, then wisdom is also blazing like fire." The fear of losing my children has been a significant and challenging teacher for me. It has not been easy, and I by no means do it perfectly, but I am learning to be with what is true: all we love is born from impermanence. Nothing belongs to me. We are each going to die. I am finding through my practice that panic and wisdom might coexist.
As you know, writing is the only way I know how to confront and metabolize the places I am avoiding safely. I sit down to reflect and find there within my automatic patterns of refusal, an encouraging perspective that makes the space in me feel safe again. I wrote this next piece when my youngest was struggling with a persistent chest cold. It is the dialogue I have with spirit. I write what's happening with me and meet my inner voice of clarity, and its advice is often and always: love no matter the cost.
