Courage, cowardly lion!

Does fearless even exist?  Somehow we adapt to personal fears that flashed into being long ago when something disrupted our sense of safety.  We ignore, we avoid, we mask, we repress.  Life calls for courage, even while fear still huddles in the shadows of our heart.  Ah, there’s a challenge!  (Poem by Dawna Markova.)

 

setting out

 

I will not die an unlived life.

I will not live in fear

of falling and catching fire.

I choose to inhabit my days,

to allow my living to open me,

to make me less afraid,

more accessible,

to loosen my heart

until it becomes a wing,

a torch, a promise.

I choose to risk my significance,

to live so that which came to me as seed

goes to the next as blossom,

and that which came to me as blossom,

goes on as fruit.

–by Dawna Markova

higher

 

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Paradoxblog

I'm a writer, and a retired psychotherapist, trying to get honest with myself, day to day. I've had a long-standing aversion to vulnerability, and so am setting myself the challenge of opening up here, in a way that may get a little chancy. There also might be times I pull in the drawbridge and curl up inside the fortress. I am paradoxsicle. Yes, I know how it's really spelled. The life I enacted for most of six decades or so turns out to have included a few self-serving delusions (there's a slight possibility you and I might have that in common, but perhaps not.) I'm trying to sort those, to see what works. The inventory can alternately prompt me to conceit or embarrassment. Sometimes simultaneously. I'm in recovery from a collection of ill-gotten defensive reactions to life which have tripped me up over the years. Perhaps it's time to lay them on the table. This might get a little messy! Meanwhile, I live in the desert southwest, although sometimes I long for the smell of the ocean, or the sound of the wind in tall pines. I am grateful for a secure home, dear friends, and love abounding. I hope to one day introduce you to the characters in a novel I’m writing, so you can fall in love with some of them as I have, and perhaps loathe a few of the others. I have two cats, two beautiful daughters, two hunky sons-in-law, and four extraordinarily gifted grandchildren, who just might have inherited a bit of their smarts from me. Or maybe it's a coincidence. Thanks for joining me!

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