fear + love

I made you a story about what fear does. But don't be scared.

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As a young child, you got trapped one day in a place you couldn’t escape from, like an empty cargo van, and inside there happened to be a big nest of paper wasps, who can be very mean if they feel attacked, and your body near their nest was considered an absolute declaration of war.

The wasps stung you over and over. You cried in pain and fear. No one came.

Later, you got free and your body healed up.

But the sound of the buzzing wasps stayed with you.

Many years later, you sit in your garden in the sun, enjoying the pure and simple beauty of the flowers that you nurture for their own sake and for the sake of the bees and their friends who make nature possible.

The bees are bumbling along,

making you happy in your garden,

pollinating and being magical.

One of them tumbles very close to your face from the front.

You see it coming in and so you sit quietly and say,

“I am not the flower you are looking for, sweet one,”

Like a fairy tale flower garden Jedi Sidhe.

And you both laugh happily and continue on.

A few minutes later, one bumbles super close to your face from behind so you don’t see it coming.

The buzz sound in your ear puts you into fear, into the fight/flight body response.

Your body tenses.

Your ability to remember the garden and the happy pollinators disappears.

As the bee comes around to the front, you swat at it with the back of your hand

To flick it away from yourself.

And as your hand pulls back to flick, you

awaken in that moment that microsecond

With an internal "NO!"

But the propulsion of your hand in motion is too far gone and your hand proceeds forward through the path you prepared

And you flick the bee away.

But what you hear and realize is that you did so such that your nail is what batted the bee away not the soft flesh of your skin and you hear that dull pop of nail against bee body and

Flooded with horror

You cry

"NO THAT’s NOT WHAT I MEANT"

And you watch with relief that the bee seems to have flown off ok but the connection is broken for now

And you realize

that’s what fear does.

We live in a time in which most of us have had the equivalent of being trapped in a van with paper wasps and getting stung repetitively. Some of us for 5 minutes. Some of us for 5 years. Some of us still live there.

And our body remembers. Our body keeps the score of all of the hurts and pains.

It especially locks these bad moments away in our nervous system which is taught accordingly to be on the ready, ready to fight for your life, ready to fight to stay safe, or run away, poised on tiptoes with ears as large as a bat, listening for danger. Watch out for the wasps because they could come any time.

And the nervous system sends the message to the brain, that mad chemist in your skull, telling him to pump out the chemicals for survival.

And they flood your body over and over like tear gas and the wear and tear actually literally kills you in some form or another eventually.

It makes you ponder closely the fact that humans are the only mammals with no built in automatic body system to purge out stress chemicals once danger has passed.

How did that happen? Evolution gone wrong? Dark intervention beyond our awareness?

But we rise. We rise and we rise again.

We keep stepping out into the garden despite our fear of the wasps because the flowers call to our hearts with their natural and pure beauty which is the physical expression of LOVE from The ALL OF ALL.

And once we learn, because the mad chemist brain, while being a little bit of an asshole, is also pretty spectacular at figuring cool stuff out, has taught us that we CAN PURGE fear and stress chemicals on our own anyway.

Even if some quirk of evolution or dark twist of fate along the way made our bodies forget, we know now how to do this.

We dance. We move. We hop around and shout. We do a cartwheel or twenty. We cry. We smash wide flat frying pans against our mattresses. We run. We bike. We row.

We SING because singing connects us to our true light language from HOME in The ALL OF ALL and because our body was perfectly designed to receive the relief and openness and relaxation and healing that singing creates for us.

We blow bubbles. We blow up party balloons and let them fly around making farting noises and try not to laugh out loud if we think any other adults are watching.

And the next time we step out into the garden, we bring all that we have learned with us.

And sometimes that means we sit on our hands while we sit in the garden amongst the flowers and the bees bumbling around doing their happy song of purpose expressed purely.

Because we love the bees so much it makes our heart about to burst.

And love beats out fear any day of the week if we only allow it to get onto the playing field.

Because that’s what love does.