Day 11

Our doubts are traitors,and make us lose the good we oft might win,by fearing to attempt.

William Shakespeare

I thought I faced my fear by confronting it on the beach at night. I knew it was only the beginning, but I thought I would meet it through living the experience of it. I thought it was a door I could open and close by choosing to confront it or to stay safe. I thought it would wait for me and allow me to deal with it at whatever pace felt most “comfortable”. I was wrong. When I left the beach that night, more than a little euphoric and proud, I had not left anything behind. It travelled with me, and it was only the beginning.

At first I was only unaccountably tired. And then I began to shake. And continue to shake, until all the world was trembling and I was at the epicentre of a vast cataclysm. Imaginary predators lurked everywhere I looked. They were not outside but inside, so there was no shutting them out. I felt exposed and threatened, as though my life were at stake. I thought I would die. I would not need to wait for one of the shadowy, anonymous predators to do it for me – my head would explode first.

They were all male. Every last, faceless predator of them. And all human. I found that I did not fear ghosts or evil spirits or anything intangible. Nor did I fear animals. The face of my enemy was always, always human. It came for me as though it had always been there, just waiting for an opportunity. By confronting my fear I had unwittingly unleashed it and brought it howling (in human form) to my door. Like a demon rising within the Buffy universe, gloating as its power slowly grew, feeding on the fear and torment of living beings, the predators of my own imagination danced with a wild and abandoned joy at their new-found freedom and power. They laughed at me, menacingly, tauntingly, mocking me with their thanks at having thus released them. Released them to prey upon me.

But my demons have no super powers. They do not need them. Because I discovered just how very deep is my fear of the human male. I had no idea. I know I’ve never been particularly attracted to them and I’ve largely tended to avoid them, but I did not know I feared them. I would have said that I fear any person behaving in an aggressive fashion, because I do not understand aggression. But for this time, at least, the face of fear has a gender.

I thanked every book I had ever read and every video I had ever watched (so many blessings, Kelly-Ann!), that I knew to hold space for the feelings within me. I curled up in a ball while the storm raged, allowing it to break over my body and mind. Ragged tendrils of psychic wind tore at my clothing, pulling and scratching at me from every angle, buffeting me, clawing at me and leaving me battered and bruised. Through it all I simply breathed. In the moments when it was possible, I gave conscious awareness to my breath, to my body, to the reality of the bed beneath me, and even, in occasional glimpses, to the world beyond my bed. Until, ultimately, the storm slowed in its intensity, and the furious wailing and moaning of the psychic wind reduced to a volume that allowed more of the world to again be present.

It did not completely abate, but raged more slowly, as if more distant. I took the opportunity to make slight, experimental movements, feeling with relief the solidity of my usual world and allowing it to become real once more. For some reason I fixated on the silhouetted face of my anonymous enemy, as if burning it forever in my mind for the purposes of later identification. Having been pursued by him, I now became pursuer. He laughed at my attempts but retreated a little nonetheless. I wanted to know my enemy and look him in the face. I could not do it, but curiosity, as well as fear, remained. Eventually I was able to sleep. Through the night conflicting senses of both security and danger pulled at me, along with a growing sense of unease. The storm was not returning; rather, its significance began playing on my mind. Because, as the perspective of distance grew, even while still asleep, I found a new knowledge coming to me. My fear of the dark has become like a metaphor for every fear I have. It has become the easy means by which I remain constrained and compliant – by which I constrain myself. I do not challenge the rules but follow them meekly. At least, I did. At the moment when I rebelled I appear to have created a threat for whatever within me seeks to control my actions. By challenging its dominion I challenged it to draw the noose of fear more tightly around me.

So now I find myself wondering. Why has this fear taken on the shape it has taken? What can it teach me? What if I ask myself about it? And, in asking, can I allow myself to abandon the censor of “logic” and truly listen? Will I have answers?

What do you see?

I see a man standing over me. His face is right above mine, silhouetted against the moonlight. I cannot see his features – only the outline of his face. I can feel his fetid breath, and occasionally, the rough skin of his hands.

Why is he there?

He is there to kill me. To hurt me. He is there to use and abuse me, to torture me for his own fun, and then to smother me.

Why does he want to do that?

Because he is a man. That is what men want. They are barely constrained animals, wearing the thinnest of veneers of humanity. They are all about aggression, power and hostility – what they want more than anything is to rip your throat out. They are frustrated by the rules of society and darkness gives them the excuse they need to become closer to who they truly are.

Why are they like that?

I do not know. They just are. They are the predatory nature of the universe, personified. If I allow men to take all the responsibility for the horror, death, destruction and violence of the world, then I do not have to take it on myself. They are hostility given form because I have chosen to make them so. I have made them into my scapegoat, forcing them to bear the burden of all that I distrust, fear and mourn.

What do they want from you? Why you?

I am nothing to them. Merely an object, randomly chosen. It doesn’t matter who is there, they just want any object on which to vent their aggression and their rage at being constrained during daylight hours. Therefore, whoever makes the mistake of venturing alone into the world of night will be chosen. They will be marked and made to become the sacrifice. The sacrifice to the dark gods of humanity, in return for the promise of a veneer of civilisation. In return for our wilful blindness. In return for a hollow belief in order and justice. These gods demand a human object – any human object. Male or female – anything that is weaker – and alone.

Can the night also be your friend?

Yes. Maybe. The energy of the world also changes and becomes more remote, distant, at night. But perhaps I can still reach it. Perhaps I can still know it is there. In my fear I am small and helpless. If I can learn to expand out to fill the universe, we may, the universe and I, be able to reach out to each other in love. The dark gods will not like this. In the same way that classical music is used to repel and dispel hostile gangs from urban gathering points, the love of the universe is a connection to the Great Music. If I allow myself to expand, I can become part of the Music and their hostility will be deflected. Maybe even calmed.

Is the world still dangerous?

Yes. But there is more than the danger. The beauty and the joy do not go away. It is only that I do not see them when I choose instead to focus on my fear, on the great jaws of destructive energy.

* * *

My own answers surprise me. They came so easily and yet it was hard to write them. I still find it the strangest of things that through writing I discover what I would not otherwise know. There are still many more questions than answers, and I notice that at the end I could not keep the energy going. I deliberately turned the questions away from fear and back towards a calming centre. It appears I had travelled as far as I could for the moment. It is time to rest, knowing that the fear is still out there, waiting for me.

But there’s a pretty obvious elephant in amongst all of that, isn’t there? I have created men as my scapegoat, as an attempt to evade my own responsibility. My responsibility, not only for how the world is, but my responsibility to see it. It is my choice never to look. No wonder “they” aren’t happy. And as long as I allow this to be the case, they will come for me. I have never been comfortable with destruction in the world. I don’t even mean violence, wars or human-made destruction. I don’t even mean natural ageing and dying. I mean our predatory nature. The fact that I cannot exist except at the expense of another. Even if I choose to be vegetarian, or vegan, I am still a cause of destruction. I am still a consumer and a polluter. I don’t even mean that I think the world would be perfect if only humans weren’t in it. Regardless of our existence, Nature remains “red in tooth and claw”, and that is something I find very hard to live with. The knowledge of my own predatory nature haunts me, and I have identified very strongly with the prey. I feel the teeth of the world, ripping at my own neck. It is not death I fear, but unreasoned, animal violence. Hunger. Simple hunger to exist, even at the cost of another. This is one of the great puzzles of existence that I will never be able to solve. I can only hope there are ways to live with the knowledge.

Something else, a little less obvious, stands out for me: the level of my attachment to my own apartment, possessions and personal security. I have made a fortress – and thus a prison – of them. My home welcomes me lovingly, but it exists, not because it is something beautiful I have chosen, but because I fear to not have it. I hold to it for fear of the wider unknown. It is the sanctuary into which I like to imagine that the “real world” cannot penetrate. Here I am “safe” and “unrestricted”. But it is fear that holds me captive and leaves me grasping after moments of life, moments of beauty. This morning, for example, was the occasion of one of those rare, protracted sunrises that make the beauty of every other sunrise pale into insignificance. I stood, so much in awe that I nearly forgot to breathe. Forgot even, for a moment, the storm of fear so fresh in my mind. There was only the sunrise. Of course I photographed it. This month is has become my habit, and this morning I found myself compulsively taking picture after picture. Why? Why do I feel such a strong need to capture the moment? Why do I try to hold on to it so compulsively, as though I am afraid it is the last beauty that will ever be in the world and that if I do not take this with me, there will be only despair to look forward to and not even the memory of beauty? Why can I not simply live the moment? Rejoice in it with full trust that beauty will continue to unfold and be available to me in many and unexpected forms and times?

In a popular film version of the Oliver Twist story, Oliver, newly arrived at happiness and unaccustomed to that state, sings:

Who will buy 

This wonderful morning? 

Such a sky 

You never did see! 

Who will tie 

It up with a ribbon 

And put it in a box for me?

Lionel Bart

It is clearly a common human tendency to grasp after the moment. After all, I am not the only snap-happy photographer out there, taking pictures of every moment, ready to crowd them into the next one. Our very habit of continuing to acquire objects and possessions speaks to our need to hold on and not let go. Supermarkets scream our insecurity at us. We are become so afraid of starvation, of loss, of suffering, that we stockpile it. We will happily swap the flavour of fresh, local produce for the security of an endless and unceasing selection of plastic food. We are even prepared to work for it. Mindless drudgery, like rats running an endless wheel, for the sake of knowing that security is always there. But rats, trained to work for reward, reach a point where the cost is greater than the reward and they cease to work. We do not. We seek an illusion. We accumulate our moments, afraid that what is to come cannot live up to what has been. And thus we crowd our lives ever fuller and fuller with the past, until we cannot stand and simply live a sunrise.

I thought I understood what Buddhism meant for me. But its message calls to me anew. It is not that I want to become a Buddhist and embrace its customs and traditions in their entirety. Its rituals and forms seem themselves a strange form of attachment to me right now. But I feel it reaching out to me, gently offering me its lessons and its wisdom. I think of my belief that I need to lock myself firmly in my apartment. Of the possessions I acquire so that I may always be certain of comfort, distraction and pleasure, whenever I am at home. I think even of the way I eat. I eat from habit, when I’m “meant” to eat and not necessarily when I want to eat. I reward myself with food, even if I don’t need it, simply because I have promised it to myself and I think I have to do or create something special in order to “make” myself happy. I do not have trust in the universe. Instead I fear it. In my desire to avoid pain, hunger and suffering, I cut myself off from everything else as well.

What would it mean to truly embrace this wild universe? Wild. As a Pagan, that is a word I hear bandied around rather a lot. I use it myself, frequently. It is a beautiful, romantic word, full of possibility. But its true nature is one of absolute uncertainty. It does not say “Trust, and the universe will provide”. It may not. The universe is loving and bountiful, but it is also a complex living entity that feeds off its own self. That which I call “I” may as likely be that which is consumed as that which is held up and fed. To be wild means to look the cycle of creation and destruction full in the face and not blanch. It means to know that any moment may be our last, that there may be famine as well as feast. To be truly wild means to embrace uncertainty and leap, daringly, from The Fool’s cliff top, knowing that there will be pain upon landing. This is the cost of standing before the miracle of Nature and allowing ourselves to live it, to be of it, with no need to grasp or hold.

To stand naked and vulnerable before the storm. Wild.