For me, fear has been the sound track playing behind most of the events of the past year. While I was in New York, our cat Dash, the younger of two, caught a rat in our house. This was an accomplishment for him as he typically hunts the small mice that look like something out of a Beatrix Potter story, and even then, he will spend all night catching one only to give it to our dog Polly to hold alive and terrified between her large fury paws. The rats are left to our fifteen year old black Burmese, who can take down a rat his own size, almost effortlessly.
When I came back from my NYC trip I woke with a nebulous sense of fear, it was a feeling of fear and sadness, and together they formed the idea that this really is it. That we do die, and in the end we are little more than the rat killed on the staircase leaving half his tail in the upstairs hallway. I sat with this feeling until it disappeared, then went back to sleep and dreamed of a young girl who in the dream insisted it’s too late to make friends once you’re an adult. In the dream I was reassuring her that I make friends all the time, but she insisted that wasn’t it. It’s the friends we meet along the way, that illuminate our path. I thought of the long trail of beautiful people I’ve met on my journey, and how we have helped each other, and now together, we hold our collective memories.
As I do things that scare me, like buying sail boats, and starting clothing lines and raising my two daughters alone, I recognize that I will experience fear. That is natural. Fear is a natural byproduct of chasing your dreams.
Sydney 