Fear… this incredibly small word is extremely powerful and it has led my life and all its decisions.
I am not sure I can articulate the difference of living life from a position of love compared to fear.
Unless you see your fear driven life, you may not even know how much of your life has been absconded by fear.
I looked up the word absconded, for it isn’t my usual word, but it felt right to express my sentiments, but I wanted to make sure I was using it properly.
Do you know its meaning?
It means – “To depart in a sudden and secret manner.”
It fits perfectly. Fear absconed with my life.
Here is what I know for sure, is that if you are left untreated after abuse, you will live from that day foreward, not as love, but fear.
Fear replaces love. A young girl living in love, becomes a young girl living in fear.
How to explain this. I go into a situation with my father filled with love for him and I come out filled with fear. I go to my mother in love and with fear of my father, and she doesn’t do anything, I then leave in fear her….
My love, or those who love me are absconed and replaced with fear.
Dr. Maya Angelou has a quote about the endurance of a child suffering is born out of the lack of alternatives.
I didn’t have a loving place to go, so I had to live as fear.
This fear mode of living is hard to describe, but it leaves you with the knowing that the world is not a safe place to be, that at any time terror will jump in front of you, that those you love will do something fearful…and you have to prepare and plan to dodge these bullets.
My whole view of life was geared toward protecting and a very defensive way of living.
I was on guard. A Fear Filled guard.
The small pint of love that lived within me was toward objects and things, items that had no power of hurting me.
But live living creatures, yikes, at anytime a friendly face could turn and bite you…and many did.
The most sad and tragic part in being a fear filled maniac, is that my children were mothered from this position.
Instead of teaching them the wonderful loving kind beautiful amazing things, my mantra was what was out to get you.
Understandably we all know how I was raised to become this way, and gratefully with a lot of fearlessness, I have been able to learn how to love and not fear AND to fear those who rightly needed to be feared and not loved.
What an amazing ride.
There is a a poem that Kim Rosen speaks of in this months Oprah magazine, called Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye
“Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things,
feel the future disolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted on and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wak up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into your day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd to the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye
What I know for sure, is that without the years and decades of sorrow, I would not recognize kindness.
Kindness, again such a simple word, but it is the gate to love.
I M Perfect lady 