300 Marbles –
Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
I would like to see you living
In better conditions
Hafiz
I remember watching a talk show with a mother who lost her young son when he contracted E. coli from a swimming pool. The thing that struck me about this woman was that she was a germaphobe who was hyper-vigilant about cleanliness. She would consistently bleach her counter surfaces, appliances, bathrooms, etc. so that the germs wouldn’t stand a chance. From the time her son was born, she was fearful of him contracting salmonella, E. coli, botulism and the other bacteria that could endanger his health or be fatal. Her house was immaculate and yet she couldn’t protect her son from his death.
How does this happen? How does a woman whose deepest fear was germs lose her son to E. coli? She reminds me of the king from Sleeping Beauty who, after hearing the oracle that his daughter would die from the prick of a spinning wheel, destroyed all the spinning wheels in the kingdom. Yet even in his vigilance he could not keep his child safe. Did the mother somehow sense her son’s demise to germs? Or is it that sometimes we draw our deepest fear into existence by the very energy that is intended to oppose it? I don’t have an answer to these questions. Maybe it was mother’s intuition. Maybe it was a completely random “accident”.
What I do know is that one of my deepest fears was to be a single mother. The reason that I was so afraid of this path was that single mothers in my family do not thrive; There is an underlying belief that we need a man to survive. This fear plays out in myriad ways but in my case, when Ex-man started coming around again when my eldest son was a toddler, I re-entered the relationship despite the numerous warning signs and my intuition telling me “Don’t go back”. My son and I were doing well, and we could have continued to thrive on our own but I was afraid of being a single mother. The irony is that I ended up with a man who never really took me in so my single (parent)hood was continually reinforced.
I can’t regret the path I chose as I wouldn’t have my youngest two children in my life if it weren’t for our union. Yet, perhaps the charge around the fear caused me to end up precisely where I did not want to be - in the position of a single mother. And when I stand in that position and truly own it, I realize that it is not as bad as I thought it would be. I wake up from the nightmare that I’ve created.
The poet Hafiz wrote:
You carry
All the ingredients
To turn your life into a nightmare -
Don’t mix them!
I believe that when you have large doses of fear, you automatically mix the ingredients and nightmares pop into your life. Think about the role fear has in your life. Can you sift out the fear before you mix the ingredients?
Fear is the cheapest room in the house.
I would like to see you living
In better conditions
Hafiz
I remember watching a talk show with a mother who lost her young son when he contracted E. coli from a swimming pool. The thing that struck me about this woman was that she was a germaphobe who was hyper-vigilant about cleanliness. She would consistently bleach her counter surfaces, appliances, bathrooms, etc. so that the germs wouldn’t stand a chance. From the time her son was born, she was fearful of him contracting salmonella, E. coli, botulism and the other bacteria that could endanger his health or be fatal. Her house was immaculate and yet she couldn’t protect her son from his death.
How does this happen? How does a woman whose deepest fear was germs lose her son to E. coli? She reminds me of the king from Sleeping Beauty who, after hearing the oracle that his daughter would die from the prick of a spinning wheel, destroyed all the spinning wheels in the kingdom. Yet even in his vigilance he could not keep his child safe. Did the mother somehow sense her son’s demise to germs? Or is it that sometimes we draw our deepest fear into existence by the very energy that is intended to oppose it? I don’t have an answer to these questions. Maybe it was mother’s intuition. Maybe it was a completely random “accident”.
What I do know is that one of my deepest fears was to be a single mother. The reason that I was so afraid of this path was that single mothers in my family do not thrive; There is an underlying belief that we need a man to survive. This fear plays out in myriad ways but in my case, when Ex-man started coming around again when my eldest son was a toddler, I re-entered the relationship despite the numerous warning signs and my intuition telling me “Don’t go back”. My son and I were doing well, and we could have continued to thrive on our own but I was afraid of being a single mother. The irony is that I ended up with a man who never really took me in so my single (parent)hood was continually reinforced.
I can’t regret the path I chose as I wouldn’t have my youngest two children in my life if it weren’t for our union. Yet, perhaps the charge around the fear caused me to end up precisely where I did not want to be - in the position of a single mother. And when I stand in that position and truly own it, I realize that it is not as bad as I thought it would be. I wake up from the nightmare that I’ve created.
The poet Hafiz wrote:
You carry
All the ingredients
To turn your life into a nightmare -
Don’t mix them!
I believe that when you have large doses of fear, you automatically mix the ingredients and nightmares pop into your life. Think about the role fear has in your life. Can you sift out the fear before you mix the ingredients?
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