I am what I fear, I think. In my efforts to manage and understand fear, I am constantly sifting through the mechanisms of fear that shape so much of life around us. And learning to make choices. Fear kills life and chokes hope. So it’s important.

I was on a radio show the other day, and the host took me aside and in hushed tones pleaded with me not to reveal the location of the dog park where his dog goes, which he had let slip, he said. I was puzzled by this, but he explained that he was concerned someone might come and steal or harm his dog, as he was a celebrity. A friend posted a link on her Facebook warning of imminent economic collapse and ruin, and her friends posted a series of warnings to others to shed all debt, stock up on necessities and simplify urgently. A tough and smart businesswoman I know said she was afraid to write online because it might attract disturbed and dangerous people.

In our world, there are rich menus of fear from which to chose, usually presented and spread electronically with lots of warnings but little concrete information. Children are taught to fear strangers, even though they are more likely to have an airplane fall on their heads than be harmed by one. And parents routinely tell me they are terrified of lurking dangers on the Internet even the FBI reports in its annual crime report that there really are very few. Everyone is talking about economic catastrophe as if the world had never seen economic difficulties before – if you read history, it’s about once every 30 years, and besides, simplifying might be a good not a bad thing.

And then there is our gazillion dollar health care system, which generates vast amounts of money to makers of medical equipment and pills by scaring the hell out of almost everyone constantly, usually in the name of public service and preventive health care. Talk to your doctor. Take your tests. Take your pills, or you could die in a few years – that seems to be the formula that works. Let’s go out to pasture. A man in a shoe store told me that anybody with diabetes has to be careful about walking and blisters, as they could be fatal. I guess  60 million Americans better stop walking or hiking.

Some of these fears are very personal to me. I take photos of my dogs every day and put them up on my website and half the world knows where they are at any given moment. I blog about my life everyday and we are opening the farm to art shows, and I do not accept the idea – as many have suggested – that I ought not to do these things as we live in a dangerous world full of crazies.  I ought to do them, because the farm is our life, and it gives pleasure to many.  I was diagnosed with diabetes years ago, am not on any medication, control it myself and walk and hike all over the place.

I am no hero, and I well understand there are disturbed people in the world – I hear from them from time to time. And I have had the firsthand experience of being stalked. If you ask, you will find that most people don’t know that it  is almost unheard of for strangers to harm or steal dogs or children in America. Or that the Internet saves many businesses and rarely harms any. The economy is a bit over my head, but it seems to me I have been reading about the end of the world in the media for much of my life, and I love to read history, and I do not personally accept the notion that this is really new or that our way of life is about to end for all time.

No wonder people love and depend on animals so much for connection and emotional support. They live in the moment and they have no messages for us but love and comfort. They do not live in fear or make money from it.

So here is my choice. There are real dangers and I take real precautions. But I do not accept the legitimacy of these fears, or the idea that they are possible means they are likely and that I need to hide my dogs, my life, my farm, my feet from the world. I don’t choose to live like that, or to medicate myself for the rest of my life against the quite inevitable end of it. I intend to be open within reason, to share and write about my world, to move forward with  my work, my writing, my photography, my love in every possible way until life, in whatever form it takes, stops me. It will not be fear, through, I think. That’s not the way I intend to go. I am what I fear, and what I fear the most is living a meaningless live in fear, which kills love, creativity and freedom wherever it goes.