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Fellow beings, Spring has sprung in the desert! Look to the bottom of this letter for photo-proof, the newest addition to the Bookshelf among my backyard’s blooming poppies. On Friday, fried from an intense workweek (we’re remaking systems, interviewing for new positions I just wrote an eighty-page operations manual for, and running two real estate photography businesses) I decided to head to the movie theater and see Dune: Part Two. I walked into the theater frazzled and exhausted, and out a man on fire. The mythology, the symbols, the rituals, the inner-outer journey reflecting one’s own — when these things are done together and right — movies take on near-spiritual roles. I walked out of the theater burning to live fully, authentically, and without fear. To create things lying latent in-wait within, to boldly move true north. There is this line from Dune called the Litany Against Fear that I saw somewhere last year and found so powerful I committed it to memory: “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
Since the mother character’s rapid-breathless-fear-facing utterance of it, I’ve been thinking about these different ways I’ve noticed wise people minimizing fear. The quote above and Jodorowsky’s atop this letter being two of them. In The Untethered Soul, which I’m reading right now, Michael Singer also offers a means by identifying only with our conscious awareness and seeing everything our conscious awareness experiences separately. John Wayne once said, “courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.” What matters is saddling up. However, note that Frank Herbert (the author of Dune), Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Michael Singer all prize perspectives that minimize fear so they are not scared to be in the saddle. I find myself super interested in developing a perspectival practice — a sort of fear-minimizing hygiene — that regularly whittles away at fear, not only for those scary moments of saddling up but also to be free to do what I am here to do. I realize the near-death experience I had in high school, and two years of brain-damaged short-circuits in speech after, reminded me over and over just how close I’d come to death, accidentally running me through such a perspectival practice thousands of times on repeat. This paradoxically freed me up to live fully and authentically throughout most of my twenties — pedaling a bicycle across the USA, reading books and wandering the world to better understand what’s happening here, attempting to create the things I wish existed in the world etc. I was once straight up asked by a pilot who read my blog and took me flying over Montana one day: “I don’t get it. I mean… how do you do it? How do you just do what you want to do? Aren’t you worried about your future? If I did what you are doing, I would be worrying about my future the whole time. It would ruin it.”
This is the sort of freedom that comes with minimizing fear through perspective, and why Jorodowsky says to “maintain a lucid current… even if this requires a major effort.” Because it frees us up! Trying times during the pandemic re-instilled some of the fear in me, but I intend to shuck it. Some perspectival practices I might work with include: casting perspective as wide as possible across space and time contemplating mortality (I carry a memento mori coin in my pocket) meditating to slow the chattering-worry thoughts getting that Litany Against Fear recitation under ten seconds creating a symbol of Jordowsky’s lucidity to carry with me
How’s your fear-hygiene? What practices do you use to whittle away at fear? What would you do if you had no fear? May we spend our lives finding out. With love and stoke, Ethan
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