Now, when I am full of fear, which can’t be avoided, I try, though I don’t always succeed, to break its stridency by breaking my egocentrism. Since then, I’ve learned that fear gets its power from the not-looking, that it’s intensified by isolation, that it’s always more strident when we are self-centered. Instead, I began to watch the winter trees as they let the wind through, always through. In time, I was broken of my illusion that fear could be conquered. This is the power of fear-to make us recoil from anything larger. This is worse than outright pain this is withdrawing from anything that can help. Initially, I felt a traumatic paralysis, the fast breathing, huddled fear of a wounded animal lying still in the brush, expecting to be struck again. I was terrified, and nothing was helping me conquer the fear.
Until my cancer diagnosis, I’d never been ill. I have been broken by disease and know fully that there are moments endured from which our lives will never be the same, severe moments beyond which everything is changed. My breaking has, indeed, led me into an expanding love of a being that is clearly God. That’s the point of engaging our experience: to live through the thresholds that paradox offers, to live through the pain of breaking to the other side, into the rearrangement of nothing less than our very lives. So our continual quest is to stay more renewed than devoured our chief task, to find a way to gain enough from what is revealed to survive the pain of such opening. As we flex our knot of blood, which some call heart, we’re blessed and cursed to stumble through the searing moments that both threaten and enrich our lives.