Thoughts for Today

I decided that I was not going to live in fear anymore, after being frightened as much as one can and still be amongst the living, it seemed like it would be an easy thing to do. But, it is not.

Everyday I have to fight back fear of an altogether different kind than when I was a child left in a dark room with only my own imagination, or running around in flight mode after being shook near off the planet. Now, every day, no matter how hard I try to filter what and how much fear I am subjected to, it is mediated AT me through other peoples televisions, movies, the internet,cell phones and now, an onslaught of competing engineers, insurance agencies and politicians trying to run for cover in case of another major earthquake.

We are all now, for the most part, interconnected and fully entrenched into a network of fear. However, I remind myself of this blog title "I Decide" and then, I decide to over-ride the fear with only one way that works for me...I read, think and write.

Writing works to dispel much of my fear because in the act of writing about anything it requires a great amount of reading and thinking and living first, researching of the most important kind, personal experience and the act of thinking about others experiences with enough energy and effort to block out most emotion. Fear is an emotion that is happiest inside a mind unoccupied by anything worthwhile.

Lately, I have begun to read different material than what I was so preoccupied with in the past. I have found myself lacking in reading journals and books from the scientific community and have been wading around in very hard to understand books and journals that make me THINK hard in order to understand what is written. This has had the most profound effect upon removing the fear that tries to attach itself to me while I am living in Christchurch, a city beseiged by underground monsters and aboveground monsters called politicians, insurance agencies, engineers with conflicting statements and buildings everywhere that demand strict attention before entering.

I was just getting a real handle on this when I was asked to allow another set of engineers through the flat that I am currently living in and writing from. Within a few hours they decided that they do not deem this place safe enough and all of us should evacuate immediately. I asked them what I was to make of the other three engineering reports that said this flat was built like the proverbial #!$* house and they looked at me blankly and said, well, a building built in 1900-1920 could not withstand another big shake and my building would be inclined to collapse. When I told the very young and smart engineer that this building was in fact built in 1949 after the major earthquake in Napier in the North Island and to the codes required for major earthquakes and had already experienced the largest earthquakes and was thereafter deemed solid as the proverbial #!$* house by several other prestigious engineers, he simply said, well, I wouldn't live in it and we are going to request everyone vacate. Methinks this engineer might be a fear monger.

At this writing, I and one other are still here. Everyone else has fled. I am waiting for another engineer to show up this morning, along with my friend with a drill to do some structural testing to these walls that everyone is just guessing as to whether they are reinforced or not. I have been inside this building during some fairly decent aftershocks and never felt in danger. However, I am fighting a ticking clock to save my haven, my home from the fear based extrapolations by a group of engineers that were not even smart enough to know what age the building was, and then...the very smart and young engineer also told me, well, anything built before 1970 is now pretty much suspect...I think he needs to go back to engineering school with generalized statements like that!

Well, I've gotten that off my chest. It will prove interesting to see how this works out. It is important to get yet another appraisal as I have had three groups tell me safe, one now tells me no, do I listen to the no because I choose to be afraid, like the others that split out of here last night, all young, all without any questions of their own, all use to looking at professionals as if they all know what the heck they are talking about...

All I can say now, is the fear I struggle with today is the fear that is so contagious with others that it affects my ability to make my own educated choices about whether my home is safe enough and not having to operate on one no against three yeses...I will decide after today's outcome with people I trust.

If CERRA gets here based on the last report before I can furnish an alternative...none of us will have any choice but to vacate and the building will be pulled down when they get around to it and all of us owners will still have to pay our mortgages because some young and smart, but not very bright man gave one conflicting and fearful view.

Two Weeks in America (Not Long Enough)

I have lived in New Zealand for nine years now. And, it helps to be specific and say, Christchurch, New Zealand, as now, I live in a place that feels continuously dangerous on many levels. Any level over ground level feels dangerous when you are plagued with the mountain building a country can do when it is having earthquakes and aftershocks nearly every day, many times a day, without any way to predict, and/or eradicate them.
So, two weeks in America was sounding good for a change, and I had important people in my life to catch up with.

Needful to say, I would be travelling back to my original home during two marked anniversaries. One year from the original earthquake in Christchurch and ten years on from 9/11. It has been a shocking decade for me; it has been a shocking decade for most people. I am here to tell you it makes no difference what you are afraid of; FEAR is a democratic e-motion that propels seemingly sane people into insane head spaces, fear is now our common enemy when we take off our shoes and empty our pockets to board every airplane anywhere in the world. All our spaces have become homogenized by fear.

And yet, what I found living at grass roots level all over the United States, where ever I went, was not fear at all, but the stuff that made me realize once again, America is a truly strong country, not because of anything more outstanding and important than its PEOPLE.

I have to tell you American PEOPLE, I was truly impressed with the lot of you. And, not just because you were already important to me, as you are and always will be, but because I had an opportunity to peek into your lives rather quickly and on the fly with not much opportunity for you to change any existing situation, altercation, lifestyle choice, or the colour of your walls, your walls all seemed the same in one profound way, they were all still standing and without one single exception, built with LOVE.

I was LOVED on by ex-husbands, ex-step children, friends I had not seen in a shocking decade and even longer, taxi drivers, waiters and waitresses, my own children and theirs, strangers on street corners and even those I had altercations with due to jet lag and the inability to wear my own shoes, other Americans offered me their shoes instead.

America, you are amazing and gifted with the profoundest capacity to spread the most powerful e-motion yet. Your rootstock e-motion is not one of fear, but of LOVE. This profound capacity is your major Major, which equips you with the arms to end all wars poured out onto your mediated heads. I stand in awe of you, now from a distance and reconcile why on earth I would ever live anywhere else, if but not for a chance, to spread the LOVE somewhere else.

And, I have no fear left in me that you might not always be the greatest nation on this planet as long as you remember to LOVE all others the way you loved on me for two weeks in America.

Thank you one and all, you KNOW who you are, and you KNOW what to do, and ‘y’all’ do it better than anywhere else I have ever been. It is in this way that Americans are truly EXCEPTIONAL. Keep living it, it is not a dream, it is your reality that makes all the difference and can be the best ‘wildfire’ of all.....xoxoxo, yours always!

I Met My Goddess

I awoke this morning and revelled in my FEAR-LESS-NESS.

At the prompting of a goddess, I joined a Yoga class that seems to put me back into my right body mind, of being cautious, without being terrified.
Apparently, the body stores fear in places that is released with simple stretches and breathing properly.

When I was young, I could not feel the immediate results of Yoga, but now that I am the same age as a speed sign in America and recently traumatized by living in 'earthquake alley'--I can instantly feel relief after a Yoga session that dislodges energy packets stuck in my body through fear. Fear sucks the life out of you. Yoga helps.

Witnessing what Yoga has done for a woman I am privileged to help take care of in the latter stages of MS, has made a profound impression upon me. Her practises with Yoga before becoming housebound and wheelchair bound are a direct result of how well she controls her own life now, from a body space with little mobility left to her hands and none to her feet.

But, oh, her mind...her mind is liberated!

I have not worked for this woman long, but already, she has done more to improve my life than any other person I have ever met.

She is my Tuesdays with Morrie experience and has taught me that knowing how to die...is knowing how to live.

It has been a transformational time, which simply means, I get to leave something behind and claim something else that might or might not be new, but was certainly buried deep inside me.

LIFE...lack of FEAR...and the ability to still move my own body around freely should be enough to inspire the will to live. But, sometimes, it doesn’t...and, on those days, Yoga helps as well as reflecting on my woman mentor who puts things back into perspective.

Please do NOT get me wrong, it is not a ‘there, but for the grace of god go I’ experience. It is definitely a ‘there, is a goddess I hope to duplicate in all my life and death experiences’ bar none!

Everything about her is worth duplicating in the face of anything that happens to me. And, so I try...she recommended Yoga, and I complied...I had to in the state of awe that I was in upon meeting her, and the state of FEAR I had allowed after the last two earthquakes we had in Christchurch.

When interviewing me for the job as one of her many caretakers (which is silly to call us, as it is she who takes care of us), my soon to be mentor asked me directly, “what are you looking for?” And, I replied, “someone to make me want to stay here”...and she supplied the reasons for that immediately.

So, now you know why my ‘moving on’ is ‘standing still’...and the words I am eating for breakfast are making me into a better version of what I was whilst traumatized, now FEAR-LESS, on the back side of meeting a goddess in the flesh.

Oh my, how things are supplied to make us KNOW we are right where we are supposed to be.

Interestingly, Tuesdays are one of my days with my goddess...and Fridays...and any other time she needs me. I will not leave her, it is for her to leave me now, or, perhaps we shall go together...one never knows and should never FEAR the living act of dying that awaits us.

I FEAR less, after meeting my goddess. And, Yoga helps, too.