Having fear then doing it anyway – is that Courage?

Today’s Rune: Isa. Standstill. Withdrawal. Ice.

“The winter of the spiritual life is upon you. You may find yourself entangled in a situation to whose implications you are, in effect, blind. You may feel powerless to do anything except submit, surrender, even sacrifice some long-cherished desire. Be patient, for this is the period of gestation that precedes a rebirth.

Positive accomplishment is unlikely now. There is a freeze on useful activity, all your plans are on hold. You may be experiencing an unaccustomed drain on your energy and wonder why: A chill wind is reaching you over the ice floes of old outmoded habits.

Trying to hold on can result in shallowness of feeling, a sense of being out of touch with life. Seek to discover what it is that you are holding onto that perpetuates this condition and let go. Shed, release, cleanse away the old; doing so will bring on the thaw.

Usually Isa requires a sacrifice of the personal, the ‘I.’ At such a time, you cannot hope to rely on help or friendly support. And yet there is no reason for anxiety. Submit and be still, for what you are experiencing is not necessarily the result of your actions or habits, but rather arises from conditions about which you can do nothing. What has been full must empty, what has increased must decrease. This is the way of Heaven and Earth. To surrender is to display courage and wisdom.

And yet there is another face to Standstill. Just as winter is a time for going within, drawing Isa can announce a time of restoration and renewal at the deepest level. In your solitude, exercise caution and do not stubbornly persist in attempting to work your will. Remain mindful that the seed of the new is present in the shell of the old, the seed of unrealized potential, the seed of the good. Trust your own process, and watch for signs of spring.”

– Paul Blum, the Book of Runes

Hmm, I’m thinking about a lot of stuff and not getting any work done, and on my way back to Vegas to have fun but worried that I’m imposing too much on Kevin. I was going to blog on that, but the blog post turned out to be more about letting yourself go for an opportunity that suddenly presents itself, which I jokingly think of as spontaneous combustion.

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I didn’t have enough time to get the blog post to the real point that I was thinking about earlier, which was something about searching yourself or study yourself, or . . . darn, I thought I had a good title in mind but I can’t remember it now.

Anyway, when I drew Isa today, I took it fairy literally because I couldn’t think of how it would apply spiritually today, just work and travel today, no big deal, you would think.

Now I see that Isa is the perfect Rune today, and particularly tonight, now that I’m here. Once this thing of staying at Kevin’s house for a week got set in place, I became anxious about it. And now that we’re here, it’s worse. He’s great about all of it, carrying my stuff upstairs for me, seemingly very comfortable with my presence, my stuff, that I’ll be hijacking his office all day, and I think he’s more considerate and conscious of the neuropathy and when he sees the things I struggle with, he does it for me the next time, before it even occurs to me to ask for help.

So why am I growing more and more anxious? He’s on a call right now and I was setting up my computers but I don’t want to interrupt his call to get the network key. Good time to be offline and journal out some big heavy realizations.

All this anxiety has nothing to do with Kevin. All the things I’m afraid of, being in his way, making him feel like he can’t go do whatever he already had planned for this weekend, imposing on him to ask for help if I do need him to be my hands for a minute . . . none of these things are problems with or about Kevin.

It’s the chemo house. There’ll be a lot more context around the build-up that went into the chemo-house decision regarding where I would stay for treatment in the book (I keep forgetting to start marketing my book that should be published this month, it’s called My Tango with Cancer. I’ll get some marketing put together soon, and do a pre-release for my Cielem’el followers.) The increasing anxiety I’m having now, with a heavy dose of fear, is because of what I now call the chemo house, which is the house I lived in with my boyfriend during chemo and radiation treatment down in Sac. It wasn’t feasible for me to be driving down from my place for treatments and I really wasn’t capable of that anyway. I could have gone to stay with my parents in South Dakota, but we decided I would stay in Sac with him. He was going to be my caregiver. Turned out that wasn’t a good decision, he admitted later that it was much more responsibility and work than he had expected and he burned out on it somewhere in the second week of my first chemo cycle.

In the chemo house it turned real ugly, real fast. And no one knew because I didn’t want to make him look bad in front of his friends by saying anything negative about him in the blog, and we kept up appearances if I went to a social with him. Even though I never asked him, he felt obligated to take me with him to the social activities we were doing as a couple before I started chemo (the wine club, milongas), and he resented the fact that I was in his house and making him put his life on hold and as his tolerance of my presence thinned, it became unbearable. I honestly think he hated me sometimes, just my mere presence irritated him.

And since then I’ve never had a date, I’ve never stayed at a guy’s house, and I’ve never had to deal with what are cropping up as enormous issues in my head. It’s completely a fabrication of my mind to fear that my mere presence, sharing space for a week, could somehow make Kevin hate me like Mark did.

OK, yep, here come the tears, which is usually the indicator that I’ve found the Truth of the situation. I am anxious and afraid to stay with Kevin for a week or to impose on him in any way and it’s because of how Mark treated me during chemo and radiation, when he was too burned out from “the whole thing” to even be civil toward me anymore. Kevin is not Mark, this is just a short visit, and he’s not going to hate me just for being here. All the anxiety and fear I had in the last three months of treatment is rising back to the surface. I have to get it under control before I ruin the whole thing for such stupid unnecessary fears.

Have the fear, then do the thing anyway. Steve Pavlina calls that Courage.

I think I’d feel better if I could conquer the fear, then do the thing with a completely clear mind, no anxieties and fears complicating my mind.