Fearing life, not wanting to feel it twist the body, trying not to experience life’s myriad bouts of suffering as they come – the aching sense of lack, the surety of loss, the dread of betrayal and being deemed unworthy, the roiling belly, your shoulders up around your ears like skin and bone earrings, some easy to see, most below the belt or caged like a zoo animal – ah yes, life as most live it. Every bit of the gut wrench, the ceaseless mental chatter, the carefully planned escape routes that lead nowhere, for there is no escape, are simply this stunningly vacant fear of life.

I can feel it within and see how this fear perverts the mind, how it sees enemies where there are none, how it creates its own legion of monsters under the bed and instead of just adding water to get even more, all I have to do is wait, not long, and they appear. Worries about all the things that will go wrong, wrong being a disgruntled version of how I wish it to be, a route that most certainly leads to suffering, doubts that stop me in my tracks before I begin, all flow from the bottomless pool of fear.

Maybe I’m the only one who has ever felt this fear.

I can posit that it’s just me. I’m okay with that, but it doesn’t seem accurate. It seems doubtful that I am the only one. I’m not that unique, and then again I am, as are you … but this deeply underlying panic, sensations that few dare to explore, feels too primal, too inherently human, to be just my cross to bear.

Maybe I had to trudge up martyrdom hill on my crazy spiritual path because I am exceedingly remedial and was trying to catch up to all of you who’ve already been there. It may be true. I may be the butt end of the pack. Funny, that idea isn’t as earth shattering to me today as it used to be. The first time that thought crossed awareness, I was appalled. Honestly, I don’t care if it is true. Not anymore. It used to drive me, this need to know, to win, to be first and fast.

God, what a waste

not really you see

I wouldn’t be me

without the chase.

But … if there is nothing but God, God masquerading as you and me, sniffing and snorting, bucking and chasing, then there is no you or me, only the appearance of me and you … oh god, what a zoo.

So what can one do to get out of this zoo? Is it a zoo when you know it’s a zoo? Am I the zookeeper or one of the caged critters? Maybe I’m neither? Maybe I’m both. What if I can’t know? What if all I can actually do is experience life … and my resistance to life, which is also life? If that’s the case, what if I don’t resist at all?

Ah, so many what ifs.

I like playing in the zoo now. Yeah, it’s still a zoo and I have no idea which animal is going to break out of its cage and gore me, or give me a sweet sloppy kiss. I observe the packs, the herds, the troops, the swarms, the colonies butting heads, conducting their fly-bys, marching together to who knows where. It’s easy to see the posturing here at the back of the pack.

Whatever this is I am, and I can honestly say I don’t know what that is, I’m in the zoo and not in it. Amaya, now she’s one of the characters walking around in the zoo, nibbling on the hay and oats, while other zoo animals try to nibble on her and she on them. She is the one with the stories of fear. Some days she’s the queen of the zoo, other days she’s sitting in the manure pile. She’s experiencing zoo-ness, being irritated fascinated angered exhilarated within the appearance of a multi-faceted zoo.

This I am is, and is not, zoo-ness, as paradoxical as a storied illusion appearing to be actual factual real life. Zoo-ness appears to be me, and you and all the inhabitants in the zoo. That is a grand story, in fact, the greatest story ever told. What I am, what is me, what is aware of the zoo, the poo, all the sticky goo, the what’s true, that my friends is not mine to know, at least so it seems to this yahoo. Every time I think I have even the skinniest of clues, it warps into a new brew.

It is merely fear that blinds the eye, fear that is nothing but a thought, a sensation named unwanted, a story built upon the multiplying nothingness. Nothing times nothing is still nothing. So, I see it. Feel it. Make friends with it. And then what? I simply wait and see.

There’s no time like now, this now filled with so much fear, to truly grok fear’s reality and how it digs its teeth into you. It’s almost like this story, this grand and glorious story, is creating the perfect circumstances for us to see through the nauseating twists and grinding aches and find relief from our bodies and minds’ reactions to the energy we call fear.   

Image: Alberta Carter Lopez, Mystical Zoo

Amaya Gayle is the author of Actuality; infinity at play, published by New Saram Press. https://amzn.to/3Rd4CTY