Walking the Wall

Fear. Fear is debilitating. It is, however, also an important warning system, much like pain is–it warns us when something just isn’t right and we are wise to pay attention to it. Balance. Finding balance, however, is empowering. While we need to pay attention when we have a gut wrenching feeling, listen to the red flags, take steps to make sure we aren’t ignoring something that needs our attention–we then need to move on and let it go. This is all very sound information and advice that I like to spout out–but I don’t always listen to myself–that would be too easy. Sometimes it is easiest for me to just let fear swallow me up so I don’t have to think rational for awhile and there are so many things to be legitimately in fear of…but it sure has the effect of swallowing up joy and beauty and life.

While thinking about these things I have been reading Sarah Dunant’s book, The Birth of Venus, which is a textbook example of how fear can poison belief and passion and beauty–that it takes things of beauty, like faith, and twists them into fanaticism and cruelty. Life and love stand outside of fear, and we should set aside fear and live our lives fully engaged. The author puts in her translation of part of Dante’s last canto in the inferno:

Into one volume all the leaves whose flight
Is scattered through the universe around;
How substance, accident, and mode unite,
Fused, so to speak, together, in such wise
That this I tell of: one simple light (p. 261)

It really is in the living of life that we find beauty and creativity, fear can make us want to hide away, to make ourselves safe havens to exist in–but that does ourselves (and life itself) a disservice, as Alessandra found, being part of life vibrantly was worth the  various pains and sorrows that accompany life, because, "such was the sound that the chorus made together, that to have been a part of it at all was enough for [her]" (391).