Smiling At Your Fears

If you want to challenge yourself to find more depth, take a couple months in another country.  Do something you’ve never done before.  Find your inner adventurer and develop a relationship with that explorer.  Here we are…on this planet.  Why not live in this moment as creatively as possible?

I love to travel.  Not only to gather new images, but to be intimate with the land.  If I am to paint it effectively, I need to know, at least, a part of its story…its people.  Fear is planted in us from early childhood.  Fear’s voice tells us we cannot do all sorts of things.  It locks us into a smaller and smaller universe.  My thought is: If you want to make your own decisions, make peace with your individual fears.  My wise friend, Maria, told me she had read if you want to overcome fear, smile at it.  I LOVE that.  It is clear.  Part of our basic need for health is creativity.  We all have amazing things to offer.  Fear tells us not to bother.  It feeds our insecurities.  Our affinity for dualistic thinking feeds the fear.  It says it’s better to hibernate than to make mistakes.  Yet how do we shake the apples out of our trees without a few shake-ups. We have chosen ease.  We have lost our patience for smiling at our enemies.  Our lives afford so much comfort.  We don’t realize how much we want to hold onto it .

So here, in this cloudy place, I am beginning a real journey into an unknown – which is creating in me something new.  A place of sunlight.  A land where clouds in the outside world are giving me the motivation to find the light which has been covered by a basket.

To be sure, in my own personal experience, wisdom has always been accompanied by pain…all part of this search for True.