Fear is a rotating thing

William Nicholson Jennings

Dear reader, earlier this week, the tornado siren went off. It was eleven p.m. at night, I was already in bed with the covers pulled up to my chin. This one floor bungalow, this creaky house on a quiet street… I couldn’t help the thought when it came: would these walls hold? We pushed through lashing rain and opened the cellar door, only to find it flooded. Water up to my knees. moving quickly. Lighting everywhere.

Crouched in the center hallway with a foldout mattress over my head, I want to say that I entered some meditative trance, that I felt my center, my breath. That all the practices I have studied— vagus nerve and Vipassana, mantra and meaning making— came to use. Calmed me down, helped me to return to myself.

But that didn’t happen. All I felt was wild fear. All I felt was my pounding heart, that way the body becomes a scared thing and nothing else. And I thought about all those times I have felt like the most scared person in the room. To have felt quivering breath and shaking hands. And the gentle phrases we use to describe this: “a loud body” “deep feeling” “highly sensitive.”

Twister, Kathe Soave

In a damp stable in the dead of winter earlier this year, I got on a big grey horse. Around me, women galloped and trotted, cantered and wove their horses through blue barrels. Later, back in the car, I cried at their ease and grace, and how hard it was for me to even saddle up the horse. Their size, their power, overwhelmed me. You can’t lie to a horse. They magnify your emotions, they hold up a mirror. I have never seen my fear so clearly as when I have seen it ripple through a horse’s body.

D said to me after that lesson: you were the most scared, which means you were the bravest person in the room.

And I have repeated that to myself over and over again when I’ve come across this wild fear, this fear that is beyond me, older than me, ancient and wild. It comes with its teeth bared, in its black cloak. It smells like blood and earth. For a while, inside of its arms, I don’t exist.

In our little house in the middle of a raging storm, I said, I am the bravest person in the room. We listened to this song on repeat:

I am weatherproof as the rain.

The storm did pass. Reader, there never was a tornado. But there was always the tornado in my mind, ripping open our house, flinging me to Kansas. That there could be one— that was what haunted me. And what else is that but anxiety, the kind that tries to protect? All echolocation, trying to find where the threat is.

Fear is a rotating thing. It pulls and twists the room into strange shapes. Always, I bow to it, when I can’t rid it from myself, though I want, in the moment, nothing more than for it to be gone.

This quote, by Jungian psychoanalyst and author Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Èstes, has hung on my bulletin board for a while:

“Be fearful, and bless others. Be fearful, and be merciful. Be fearful, and forgive... by doing the blessing, doing the mercy, doing the forgiveness, doing the loving, and doing the doing… that fear is dissipated”.

The blessing, the mercy, the forgiveness, the loving, the doing. These neat and tidy steps.

how I feel

Fear fogs the mind and blurs decisions, movements, choices. And also connects to me to every living thing: humans and deer, bald eagles and bats. Fear says, I really really want to live. Fear says, I want to give you the world, but I want that world to be safe.

That sentiment feels like a blessing in its own right, though, of course, the world isn’t exactly safe. “Ships aren’t made for the harbor,” I say to myself over and over again, when I get on the horse, speak up in the room, walk into the woods.

For so long I was embarrassed to be so afraid. But all we can do is work with what is here, to watch as it tries to work with us. I forgive, I love, the animal in me that wants to survive. And has. Bless her.

Thank you, always, always, for reading.

xoxo,

Raisa

Three poems on fear I come back to over and over again:

Prompt: What is the weather pattern of your fear?

Prompt: Tell the story of your fear as a fairytale

Prompt: Your fear is a body of water. How does it move?

Three ordinary miracles this week:

• this song and this song being connected

• this man’s unadulterated enthusiasm

  

• this bathtub:

  

Upcoming ways to work with me:

June 26th-28th; Writing Ourselves Home

August 28th-30th; The Poetry of Presence

Over the summer, I’ll be offering creative advising sessions. Stay tuned for more!

Reading at Indy Type Shop last week!

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