Fear Nibbles

(Story in progress/ starts at ‘Turning the Compost Pile’)

I’m not sure exactly when Fear got in,  but can confirm it breached my perimeter and settled at the farm some time ago. Just around the same time I found a mouse in my box of lasagna. Sometimes fear doesn’t announce its arrival with a growl, but nibbles away at an unattended noodle, in a quiet pantry. Where the food hoard lives.

I don’t think I strike most people as a “fearful person” and until recently, I would have adamantly agreed. I’m a pretty optimistic person, all round. Turn up the volume on an impending problem or crisis, however, and I’m first in line to provide professional level risk assessment, unnecessary leadership and unsolicited, boundary breaching hyper-vigilance.

In fairness to myself, I’m a decent problem solver, and this has (truly) alleviated many a difficulty in my life -real or anticipated. It can be helpful, sometimes, to trust the patterns I tend to see that seem to have some power to help me choose less stressful options. I think it has also kept fear out. The kind you can name, recognize and feel. But fear is sneaky.

The thing with this set of danger-sniffing skills, however, is they have a tendency to sprawl. If I care about a thing or a person, I have an automatic sensor system that runs stats, analyses patterns and predicts outcomes. Particularly unwanted ones. And I have typically done so with the oblivious exuberance of a lab retrieving rocks from a river.

When the kids were young, and I worked as a social worker, I had a map that felt like mine, to attend to – to be responsible for. This gave me focus for my Spidy Senses, a role for my skillset. It kept me from problem solving all willy-nilly.

But these last few years, as the farm became incrementally quieter and my skills (I worried) were getting rusty, it became a program running in the background. A kind of undetected malware. In the absence of anyone  in my immediate circle needing  (or indeed even wanting lol) my assessment services, I lifted my head up and looked back out at the wider world I had turned away from while growing vegetables.

I’m just going to say it. I got a bit freaked out.

For a bit of perspective, I  think a certain kind of discomfort took root when 9/11 happened and this new fear arrival might be an extension of it. I had been to the twin towers just two weeks before it happened. I was so distressed about it, I returned in the spring, to see with my own eyes and feel whatever ‘truth’ could be discerned, under my own two feet.

I booked an high-altitude room at a hotel in the financial district, where I could see the gaping wound in the ground. I walked to the hole and talked to people who had been there, and who lost loved ones. I let myself cry and accept it was real. Something beyond my comprehension had happened.

New York had always been a very special place for me, the setting of one of my favourite novels as a young person (Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin). That novel planted a set of images my dreams still reach for when they have something important to say and resulted in my visiting  a number of  times in my 20’s and 30’s.

It was also the setting of Sesame Street. I was raised on Sesame Street. I want to say in it.  Bob would sing “These are the People in my Neighbourhood” with NewYork City muppet workmen, window washers, and dog walkers who lived in close proximity but were always kind to each other and it was my neighbourhood too. I was imprinted by a New York accent as a young child, and never lost the familiar comfort in hearing it. To this day I hum that song when I see someone digging up a road wearing a hard hat.

Anyway, my sense of safety and delight was dramatically injured by 9-11, and it took some real healing to stop thinking about it. And I’ll be honest, it wasn’t just that it happened.  It was that something felt amiss.  I smelled narrative perhaps for the  first time, and it was distressing, because despite my tenacity and research, I kept arriving back at explanations that felt too simple for what I was trying to understand.

Over time, I turned away. My skills were of no use there.

Anyway, a similar sort of discomfort creeped in during Covid. I wanted the kids home. I called the farm and Ark and insisted we all board it. I experienced similar, low-level dis-ease  with the over-simplified stories and felt repelled by the narratives around us and them that emerged; the fortification of simplistic ‘sides’ and the absence of any acceptable nuances. I dug in at some point, refusing to pick a team and felt I was breaking some sort of social rule. I watched sides get further and further apart. And then, it seemed, as quickly as it had begun, it was over. And I turned away again. 

But in the increasing quiet of living alone at the farm, I went completely off-map and found a world of advancing calamities on the horizon  I could put my skills to work on, before ( I worried) they became dormant. I spent a lot of time in the tangle of the web, tracking patterns and assessing where my skills would be best put to use. Out there.

And fear, which resists this sort of free floating, attached itself to my love of food instead, and began eating away at my peace. One dry, unattended noodle at a time.