Sisters

My sisters, Denise on the left, Suzanne in the middle. Easter dresses I am sure. Maybe I was ten?

The new year is here. Imagine. What took so long! I have been writing this evening and I came across this little piece that began with a wonderful sentence that made so much sense.

"Fear is what happens when reality collides with our personal fiction." We are sometimes so filled with expectations that no life could live up to them and of course, we become filled with fear because ~~~~ where can we possibly go not being able to meet our expectations. Our moments become so complicated that there is no longer any direction to which we can run and we end up standing in one spot becoming filled with fear because we become saturated with the uncertainty of disintegration. "I am going to perish" And we begin to create hell on earth. No way out? Way out.

Stop thinking. Take up a paint brush, a needle and thread, a vegetable and a knife, and ply a craft. Absorb yourself in the beauty of the craft. Think only about the paint. Forget the self. The self will live whether you worry about it or not. Create something beautiful. Where does this beauty come from? What a luscious quilt! Where does the beauty come from? What a stunning painting! Where does the beauty come from? This soup is so rich and comforting. Where does the beauty come from?

We are each of us filled with a wealth of beauty, a fountain of talent, creativity, and in the end, we have at our service the knowledge of a vocabulary abundant of all the words necessary to describe greatness.

So what do we do? We complain. We become so negative that no one wants to be with us. We don't even want to be with ourselves. We make excuses why we don't communicate with our friends and those we love. The air around us becomes black.
They are our own
I know fear. I have been intimate with it. Leaving the house to go to work has been an issue. Dealing with it was not easy and is not easy. And living without fear at times seems inhuman. Unnatural.

Living without fear or as much as we can without fear, frees us to be more present for everyone around us. It allows us to more enjoy the textures of people. I love that. "The textures of people". And we do have feelings. And it is OK to have these feelings flow out of us freely. We can appreciate them as being a part of ourselves, our own texture. Our own present moments.

Fear is what happens when reality collides with our personal fiction. This really speaks volumes.