Why I live here. My front yard this evening.

For the past few years, it has seemed sometimes that much of my life is about opening up. Opening up to Maria. To friends. To Frieda and the dogs. To the donkeys, and now, Simon. To a spiritual life.  To the people who talk organic and  chant and tap and buy local. I’ve become a lot of what I used to ridicule, and perhaps this is common among people who get older. But I don’t think so. Most of the people I know close up when they round 50, and squawk a lot about the price of things and the way things used to be. For all of the problems of the world, I don’t want to be anywhere but here, nor do I believe that the past was better than the present. If you doubt it, read any book or two about World War II.

Up until a few years ago, my life was shaped by fear. All of my life, every part of it. As fear has receded, I have opened up, and it cannot be that the two things are not connected. Fear is a killer. It kills hope. It kills change. It keeps us closed, often frozen in lives we don’t like or want. In our culture fear, is everywhere, sold on the stock market like any other commodity – the news, health care, politics, insurance, retirement funds, old age, medical tests, the weather. The government warns that sleeping in bed with dogs can kill you, and doctors say you should  test yourself all the time for everything and take pills to avoid ever dying, and public health officials warn to avoid stray kittens because they carry disease,   and dogs will bite you, and  Storm Center sells ads by the millions for  “Catastrophic Weather Coverage Round The Clock,” and politicians say we are in great peril every day of our lives from terrorists, foreign hordes or deficits or school teachers and librarians, and authorities say fear strangers because they can kill you and the news says fear lettuce and sugar can poison you.

And why do you wonder why people are so afraid? Maybe because they believe all this stuff and don’t notice how profitable it all is to everybody but us.

So maybe the best thing to do is downsize, work on those IRA’s, and don’t actually see, touch or talk to people and animals in person or ever eat unpackaged food. For that matter, don’t even go outside. Speaking only for myself, I would much rather pour honey on my butt and sit on an anthill.

We all have to make up our own minds, but I can tell you my heartfelt view that living in fear is not the way to open up. Fear closes you up, paralyzes you, seals off your heart and soul from love and positive experience. It will kill off your dreams as fast as a bullet, and maybe much more likely to. Last week, an old and dear friend came to see me – we hadn’t seen one another in a few years – and she said she was shocked at how open I was, how I hugged her and touched her. “You’ve never hugged me in all the years I’ve known you and I wouldn’t have dared hugged you. But you hugged me!” Hmmm. Well, this week, I was on the Internet kissing a donkey. Life is strange, life evolves. Maybe too much opening up isn’t good. But if it is, I can look anybody in the eye and say as the fear went away, openings emerged. The two are not unrelated.  If you ever want to kiss a donkey.

Fear is the enemy of the soul.