"Fear"

I looked up top 10 lists for fear and saw zombies.  Really?  How many zombies have you fended off recently?  How many spider or snake attacks?  Have you fallen off any tall buildings?  Did your plane go down?  Crazy people.  I'm kind of pleased that some of my fears about the environment and politicians have moved up on the list in the last year -- though quite displeased there are impelling reasons for those issues to move up the list.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to look at spiders either.  I just think it's unlikely one of them is going to kill me -- unlike my perfectly legitimate paranoia about ticks, which gets to the point of a lot of fears.  Ticks are foreign to me.  I'm afraid I don't know how to protect myself adequately.  The deer raiding my garden carry ticks, so it's a reasonable threat.  Ticks carry Lyme disease.  I don't want to catch that.  Kill deer.  Reverse climate change so ticks die in winter the way nature intended.  Vote all the climate change denying politicians out of office.

I'm willing to admit my tick paranoia might be a little overblown.  We don't have to kill all the deer, just the ones plaguing my neighborhood.  Give the deer birth control and napalm the places ticks lurk.  Maybe cull the herd and feed orphans venison.  I'm reasonable.  There might be a few action plans which I could buy into supporting.

The point is to actually look at our fears and figure out ways to address them.  Let's take fear of failure as an example.  If you're afraid to try something because you're afraid you'll fail, you've failed.  If you half-ass something because you're afraid, you've failed.  I understand dread of putting yourself fully into something and finding in the end that you didn't achieve what you wanted but that's the risks in achieving success.  You have to try or you certainly won't win.  Sometimes a failed effort leads to a better victory in something we didn't even know to look for before the attempt.

Okay, time for a smooth transition into ducks and fish...

Dark and gloomy lake full of ducks

The lake's spillway, which is the overflow for this human-made lake

I went to Pennsylvania this week.  It was dark and overcast.  Kids were in school.  To me, a perfect for a day trip to Linesville Spillway at Pymatuning Lake to look at carp.  This was my friend's idea.  I don't usually go out of my way to see carp, but apparently quite a few people do -- but not on my dark, overcast day.  You can see video of the reason why here.  That's a lot of fish.  They're really big too, like 3-4' long.

Close up of ugly carp mouth which was big enough to swallow your leg

We took country roads back to Ohio and stopped at the cheese factory where I bought a huge block of Swiss which I later broke up into smaller chunks and froze for later.  We ate lunch at the Amish restaurant and had comfort food.  We stopped at a produce stand where I bought pickling cukes and more.  I love this time of year for produce.  I was back home early enough to can plums, chop up peppers, and who knows what else.  It was a very nice day.  Who needs sunshine?  It just gives me migraines anyway.

I'm noticing that I like to paint apples lately, and each kind of apple has different meanings to me.  The apple above is a bit of my current painting, the part next to the post office box I showed you last week.  I've made progress on this piece and am starting to hope I'll be able to show you the finished painting soon.

"Spider"

I was in the eaves of my house the other day.  I don't go in there very often, but I keep old furniture in there, and had some items I wanted to tuck away.  I should've looked first, but I went in head first and got a faceful of spider webs.  Ick, ack, yuck!

I swept it out and stored the furniture, plus discovered about 100 years of Grandpa's National Geographics.  I thought back to lazy days on his porch, listening to old folks talk about the usual things while I looked at African women's breasts, Indian women's nose rings, Eskimo's harpoons, South American pyramids, and Russian mummies.

My sister thought the nose ring was very cool and wanted one.  Dad said something decisively prohibitive.  I said it wasn't very practical since it had a golden chain looped to an earring.  Picture climbing a tree with a chain hanging out of your face!  What if you got in a fight and your opponent had a ring?  I vividly imagined a bleeding nose and decided this kind of jewelry was foolishness.  Sis understood suffering for beauty.  I rejected the concept.  If the number of people with nose rings these days mean anything, more people think like Sis these days.  She was clearly a trend setter.

I know I'm not alone in having my world expanded by National Geographic.  I looked into the eyes of people far away and felt their humanity even though I lived in a lily white area and the only black person I'd met was Santa Claus.  I saw women archeologists, deep sea divers, anthropologists, and animal watchers and knew I could grow up to be whatever I wanted to be.

A friend of mine rejected a job offer with National Geographic.  As a photographer, how could he possibly walk away from such an opportunity?!  "I didn't want to lay on my belly in a swamp for weeks just to get the perfect photo of an alligator staring me in the eyes."  Well, I suppose that makes sense.  But still, I'm glad somebody is willing to do it.  My world was larger and more inclusive because of their sacrifices.

I talked with someone about selling Grandpa's magazines once.  I was told everyone saved their National Geographics, so there really isn't much value to them.  Financial value that is, because I still value being able to look at them.  They're beautiful and they make me 10 years old again on Grandpa's front porch with the delicious aroma of Grandma cooking lunch wafting in.  I'd be willing to sell the really early magazines before photos though.

There's also something beautiful in the fact that many people saved their collections.  I'm glad so many appreciated expanding their worlds through the work of scientists, writers, and photographers.  It was worth a faceful of spider webs in my eaves to remind me of their efforts.

There's been much talk of bigotry and chauvinism this week.  Maybe more people need to dust off their pile of National Geographics and look into the eyes of people who might look different, but are humans with feelings, hopes, and dreams?