My post office box – P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816 – has been crammed with messages over the past week or so. CD’s, books, letters, post cards, donkey cards, stories and good wishes. I have not gotten through half of them yet, and they are still coming in. Today I got this card above from Susie Mintz, she made it herself, it included a quote from the poet Rumi which read: “The wound is the place where the Light enters you,” and this touched me, I believe it is true. The wound is the place that brought light and healing to my wounded heart, and the light entered me all over.

As many of you know, I have experienced and written about fear for a very long time, much of my life seems, in retrospective, to have been one lone and continuous panic attack, I feared so many things so deeply.  I was a valium addict for 30 years and underwent analysis, talking therapy and spiritual counseling. Open Heart Surgery is something to fear, and yet I did not, really, not compared to the many things I have been afraid of in my life.

I have always seen this surgery – from the very first – as an opportunity to understand my body, to get well and experience the rest of my life more fully. I was struggling for some time with loss of energy and difficulty walking. It is a miraculous thing to me that I never got tired writing, taking photos, or working on the blog. I am beginning to see that creativity kept my heart alive, my work did not damage it. It was on my walks that I began to struggle, that my heart began to fail.

If wounds are the place light enters us, then an open heart is the place for fear to come in as well. It is a fearful surgery.  I have come face to face with a great fear – stopping my heart and rebuilding parts of it. It has changed me. I understand more clearly than ever that fear does not make one safe, it does not make one wise. It is simply a different form of disease, something that can cripple us, make us into a kind of slave, shut down our passion and ambition for life. Fear kills love, it is a lethal injection, I believe it breaks the heart as quickly as arterial disease.

In our world, we are constantly reminded to fear the world – it is violent, dangerous, coming apart. I do not choose to fear the world or speak poorly of it., I do not choose to live my life in fear.

My doctors keep telling me that fear is unhealthy for the heart, and I do sometimes wonder if a life lived in fear helped damage mine.  I do not listen to people who speak in fear and alarm, I do not spend much time on their news of the world. My doctor told me before the surgery – she came in for a private talk – that there were risks attached by my operation, and she told me what they were. I wondered whether or not to share this sobering news with Maria and I wondered whether or not to say goodbye to Maria, to tell her how much I loved her and how much she meant to me,  just in case.

I decided not to. It would just upset and frighten her, and besides, she knows how much I love her, it does not need to be said. I saw clearly in the hours before my operation that fear is, in fact, just a space to cross, a geography, an idea we carry in our heads, the way so many of us are taught to think. They seem to need us frightened, so that we will do the things they say we should do and buy all of the things they say we will need.

I am done with you, I said of fear as they wheeled me into the operating room. You have, I thought, never seemed smaller or more  meaningless. If I am not afraid of this, then you have no hold on me.

So my heart is healing and beating well, and it is a stronger heart, I see that already. It is not a fearful heart, it wishes to be a big heart, loving and open to life. Charging up a steep hill on my walk today, I no longer felt my heart as something fragile and worrisome, it is my partner now, we go up those hills together, puffing like a tough little locomotive,  we get stronger together every day, we trust each other a bit more with every new step, we beat the drum for life together.

If the wound is a place for the light to enter, perhaps it is also a place for fear to leave.