"I Don't Fear Heights or Snakes or Red-Haired Women!" Sharing Things That Shake Our Spine.
Posted: Sunday, February 27, 2011
by Christofer French
Rain Dancer Associates, LLC
A long tall cowboy leaning up to a bar, elegantly started off a conversation with the above line. Naturally, the dramatic ender was “red-haired women”, for everyone knows that “Heights” just make you dizzy, as long as you don’t jump, and snakes that we actually get bitten by are far less numerous than the image of them lurking under a sandy rock in some brown field on a hot day in the southwest.
Fear in the abstract can drive you mad. It makes you shiver; it makes you wet your pants. Fear can be sharp bullets, running into things in the dark; getting impaled by this or that mechanism, or drained of your blood by the image that we can best conjure. Fear felt deeply just tears through you. From physical pain to psychic imprisonment to actual confinement to social stigma or being stricken with permanent shame, fear lurks around us like a disembodied cousin.
Fear a Friend?
Fear is ubiquitous and unkillable. But somehow you would have to conclude that Fear is our friend. It is so much a part of us, it obviously serves a purpose. It haunts our sleeping and our waking. It occupies our lying down and our rising up. It has always been there since the beginning of our species, and now Fear takes on super large dimension as we fear War and Economic Collapse, the sun flaring, the sun darkening, and now the ever old becoming always new: Home Invasion.
Some of us have large continuining robust fears. Disease level fears. Some of us are much more comfortable and live in rational states where we just have reasonable fears.
The What of Fear. The Why of Fear. It seems we are the Host of Fear and Fear’s Audience. Is it all just an invention of our minds, or is there something out there that performs some service that assists in keeping us alive and functioning?
Grass Being Cut By a Scythe
Those fears that we share in our relationships and dates, and loves. Those fears that inhabit the many – those fears are the ones that spread like an ancient contagion, dropping us like grass being cut by a scythe. Those fears, it would seem, have an actual consciousness of their own.
Maybe a part of our social function, with our loved ones and cherished friends is to simply present a different state of mind, creatively drawn with freshness and the smell of new cut flowers. Maybe we are there for each other to quell each other’s fears. Wouldn’t that be a delightful thought? To seek states that drive the fear from our neighborhoods, simply because we work daily on working stout hearts? And maybe the residence of ancient hatreds lived first in fearful hearts. As in: “Who the hell is that coming over the hill? Ain’t seen them before?”
Mosquito Repellent
Yes. Fear spawns, and together we should work like mosquito repellent and malaria-killing drugs to dispel those states in ourselves and our neighbors this most primitive of human states – fear from thriving in our domains.
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