Flights of Fear

I love tastings! Call me yuppie, or uppity, or shee-shee, or whatever - I love enjoying little bits drink and food arranged and paired in such a way as to emphasize the experience of taste and texture rather than the mere satisfaction of animal hunger. I'd rather have a wine and cheese pairing that brings me ecstatic awareness of sensational joy in my capacity of scent, taste, and felt than a huge meal prepared to satiate my physical hunger and induce a food coma. I'd rather have a beer flight than a pint of my favorite stout.

Recently I introduced a group of jobseekers to the concept of "flavors of fear." They ate it up! It wasn't quite 31 flavors, but it was about 18 more than most of them were aware existed. Not that they hadn't experienced them - not at all. Everyone recognized the feelings of awe, concern, horror, reverence, and dread - they just weren't aware that all of these were aspects of fear. We did some exercises around bringing up these different feelings/emotions and "tasting" the fear in them. We appreciated that more often than not these were blends that may even include other feelings/emotions which we have been taught to believe are separate from fear - love, care, anger, arousal. Like fine wines, to consciously experience emotions and their associated biochemical cascades is to notice notes and aromas we don't expect - like leather, tobacco, and apricot from rotten grapes and old wood.

I love turning people on to fear! Fear alerts us to what is important and arouses us to interact with a challenge. Our greatest fears as individuals are our greatest challenges as a species - fear of the unknown, fear of the "other," fear of abandonment, fear of annihilation. Our challenge is to slow down and practice interrupting our reactions to fear so that we may taste what is moving through us. When we can become aware of the flavors of fear we can make choices to respond rather than just react (and there are way more than just fight or flight responses!); we can appreciate what this fear has to tell us rather than just stuff ourselves until we fall asleep.

Do Be Do Be Do

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's seen this bit of "folk wisdom" (i.e., graffiti on the bathroom stall): To do is to be - Socrates; To be is to do - Satre; Do Be Do Be Do - Sinatra

That last one seems to be the most poignant for me at this point in my life. I vacillate constantly between identifying with what I do (especially to make money) and trying to express who I am regardless of what I do. I've labeled the former as a masculine characteristic, but I know many, many women who do this, too, and it really is a Western characteristic (which, admittedly, is quite masculine).

My recent (the last three years) experience of being unemployed for at least three months annually (and, no, I'm not in the construction business - I graduated, got a divorce, and relocated) has been very difficult on my psyche - as well as my finances. While I value quality relationship work, community building, intellectual exploration and exercise, and being a good friend and mother, I still struggle with whether or not I have a purpose (right?) here without producing anything for financial compensation. And - this cannot continue for long for very practical reasons. While my friends share food, entertainment, and companionship with me regularly without any expectation of recompense, I'm the one that has to pay my bills.

So, this is another thing - the tension between how I live and how I want to live: I live alone in an apartment and must have money coming in to maintain my ability to continue doing so; I want to live in community where wealth emerges from relationships and experience and basic needs are covered by collective resources. But who am I in the latter scenario? Am I actually striving to dissolve my identity by intending to have a life in which I can live fully and not make any money? Would this feel like suicide? I would be doing just what I am now in my unemployed state, but would the absence of the Damocles sword of bills really contribute to my being happy and me while not making money?

I like to think I'm somehow more evolved or mature or better than all those "spoiled rich kids" who live in just such a state of being - but I doubt it. I may become inured to real life, removed from the real experience of so many who continue to struggle. From my privileged "compound of community" I may lose awareness of how life happens. Or would I? My imagination is failing me when I try to envision a world beyond consumerism, capitalism, and hierarchical power. Perhaps "infecting" the world with values that have nothing to do with money or production would change things so much that what I perceive as "real" life would be radically different from what I know now of privilege and power.

However, I'm/we're not there yet. Not even close - regardless of how many wonderful people are in my sphere of influence. The levels of complex, interdependent aspects of how humans exist on this planet is beyond predictable. I keep watching for the linchpin, the leverage point that will move humans to actually evolve - or disappear. We are amazingly adaptable creatures, but for all our technologies and all our stuff, we are still acting out very old patterns. Evolution (transformation) is different than adaptation (transition) and it will take evolution to get me to imagine how I can be and do without some form of money.