Sunday, October 18, 2009

Boo

Hallowe'en wood and salt firing. Looking forward to it. I hope we get some good pieces out of the kilns :)

Fear

Facing my fears head on has been the only way I have ever overcome anything. God knows I've tried running away from things all my life but until I made the biggest mistake of my life and could no longer run away from the consequences, I never appreciated that the key to dealing with life is to deal with it. If you fear the worst, relax and let it happen.

I ran down to the second barn on my property just now, to feed the horses a flake of hay and give myself an excuse to run around outside under the stars. There is no moon just lots and lots of stars. As I've been getting older, my night vision gets worse so it took me a while to adjust to the darkness and yet I walked down, down to the second barn, no lights, bad vision, only the stars and my memory to keep me on the right track. And I thought, when I was younger, I never would have done this. I would have imagined the boogeyman, Bigfoot, vampires, spectres, things to creep me out, and it all would have prevented me from running down to the barn and feeding my big, four-hoofed dogs. What is fear but, 90% of the time, our imagination? Or what we imagine will go wrong, what we imagine will jump out and eat us? It's all in our head. My dog was walking with me. He was fine. He was not perturbed. So why should I be? Take the cue from the dog.

We market in fear, in western, modern media. Watch the news. See how every story is manufactured to alarm, surprise, make us fearful. Nothing is meant to inform us, as if we were rational mature beings, only scare us. Scare the tiny child within.

Face your fears. Face them square on and crush them to pieces. 90% of them are nothing but bullies anyway.