Be Not Afraid

For the past few days I have been meditating (perhaps too sedate a word) on the subject of fear. On January 1st a 24 year-old hiker, Meredith Emerson, went missing on the very mountain we hiked two months ago in North Georgia. Within days her case was in the news across the country with up-to-the-minute updates on CNN, headlines at the top of our paper every morning and live broadcasts from multiple search parties in the mountains. The news gets more disturbing daily; although her body was found on Sunday night the papers reported this morning that she may have been held three days before she was killed.

For the past few nights I have crawled alongside you in bed, held your tiny hand in mine and let the tears roll down my cheeks. The story has hit close to home for reasons I can only partially describe. Two months ago when we hiked Blood Mountain (I've noticed that reporters have not chosen not to use the name in their reports) we carried Poppa Joe's ashes with us and sprinkled them from one of the most beautiful overlooks in the North Georgia mountains. Blood Mountain is sacred space and knowing that something so horrible and terrifying happened will now always be sewn into my memory of the mountain.

More gripping, however, has been the realization that one act of violence can cause such an avalanche of fear. I see in Meredith Emerson a woman who on the first day of a new year took her beloved dog out for a walk in one of the most beautiful places on earth. It sounds like a perfect way to kick off a new year, an idea that certainly would have appealed to me. The joy of walking with your dog in the woods is spiritual, meditative and pure. I'd like to think that one day you might head off for a walk in the woods with your dog. I'd like to believe that that idea didn't scare me.

One night recently I stretched out beside you while your nursed yourself to sleep and whispered admonitions into your ear: "Don't ever hike alone" and "Don't you ever talk to crazy old men" and simply "don't trust everyone you meet." I gathered your body close to mine and felt the fear move inside me as my imagination took leaps from one horrifying scenario to the next. And then, as you often do as you are drifting off to sleep, you stuck one little hand up in the air with your palm out and your little fingers slightly curved in an arc.

Fear Not.

The hand gesture, or mudra, is a familiar one. When I went to Thailand in 1999 I brought back several small metal statues of the Buddha bought from a street vendor for less than ten cents each. My favorite has always been the Buddha with his hand in the Abhaya Mudra, the sign of fearlessness In doing a little research on the mudra I found this link on Wikipedia: "The mudrā was probably used before the onset of Buddhism as a symbol of good intentions proposing friendship when approaching strangers."

We find ourselves living in a world where not every stranger who crosses your path has good intentions. So how does a girl with a sense of adventure, an inborn desire to be friendly and compassionate coexist with people who aren't? The answer is unclear but I will resist all temptation to scare you into staying home instead of hiking and averting your eyes whenever a stranger crosses your path. Afterall, you are far more likely to find joy in those encounters than sorrow. The world is more good than bad, people are more deserving of trust than not and while fear certainly has it's place (always, always trust your gut when you feel uncertain about a situation) it should never be a guiding ethic.

Thanks for reminding me.