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A sunny dream, with no fear.

1/3/2017

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​For the fun of it, I decided to climb out on the cabling of this vast, floating wind harvester, a machine that was part of a long stream of similar metal air ships, all of different colours, shapes and sizes, but all looking to some degree like massive grain combine harvesters. In the blue sky, the sun was cheerfully shining down onto wide fields of green farmland about half a mile below us. I was with a couple other guys, both of whom seemed less knowledgeable about all this than me, but who nevertheless followed me out onto the cables.

At one point I looked backwards into the stream of air harvesters behind us, and just above them a vast, new one in yellow was bearing down on us. It was longer and slimmer and obviously faster than the older, more upright, bulkier machines. It seemed to be coming right at us, but instead blew by just overhead, noiselessly but causing a tremendous wind.

I looked around to the front, in the direction it had disappeared, just as a small, old machine was blown out of the air and crashed, its wide catcher-conveyer section smashing into that of the machine I was on. I said, "Look at that," as it balanced there. Then it toppled over and fell out of sight towards the ground. I was trying to understand what happened and said to the others, "It's the big, flat forward section that makes these machines very vulnerable to a sudden wind."
​

As I was waking, I was amazed that I had no fear of heights at all way up there. Maybe that was the point of the dream, the exuberance that comes with a lack of fear, the way I'm feeling about people lately! And I thought the machines were like an air version of sperm whales that open their great mouths and sieve out plankton. I couldn't see any animals in the air that these machines were after, like birds, so maybe there were vast numbers of insects up here in this particular air stream on this planet. And where did the idea of the flying harvester come from? When I was a kid on the farm, I used to watch combines mow down wheat fields, lifting the stalks up into their bellies where the grain would be taken from the chaff that was shaken out the back. On large farms, a number of harvesters, one at an angle behind another, would mow down an entire field fairly quickly.
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Freedom to talk

12/25/2016

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Since losing my fear of people a year or two ago, I have a compulsion to talk. I guess it’s a result of 65 years of hiding inside myself. I don’t feel any need to do that anymore, and so I sure don’t want to. I feel like I’m finally joining society.

And yet I’m not. My new blabbing attitude, for instance, should fit right into social media. But it doesn’t. Facebook, for example, seems to be divided into two opposing camps, neither of which I can relate to. There are the angry insulters and there are those who will only smile. (Yes, I know I’m overly generalizing). The angry ones seem to want to hurt as many people as they can, and the others don’t want to hurt anyone. I’m with the others. I don’t want to hurt anyone either. And yet I can’t stop talking and it’s become obvious that when I do, no matter what I say, if the readership is potentially large enough I will hurt someone in some way.

So, I see why sensitive people don’t say anything, even when they don’t have the fear I’ve had all my life: They’ve spent all that time learning what not to say. Which is anything, if the crowd they’re talking to is big enough. Well, I’m a fairly quick learner. I’ve been learning that attitude myself lately. The trouble is, it’s destroying all my newfound freedom.

Now I see that the larger the crowd is that I talk with, the less freedom I have. In any large group, there will be people who will take offence at something. A small group would be ideal, say four or five sitting around a table in a café somewhere, but for that I would have to find friends who are just like me in their ideas, or who are all happy to talk endlessly about only one thing, which would bore me. So then it would seem that the most freedom would come in a conversation with only one person. That might be a person who is just like me in beliefs, but more likely someone who is willing to accept me for the somewhat strange person I am, and I them, in the intense give and take that is a true two-way street.

Which brings me to my conclusion from this year of experimenting. Since I do not want to stifle myself again, after having done it all my life, and since virtually any relatively free opening-up is likely to annoy someone, the only real alternative is to try to thicken my skin as quickly as possible, to deeply realize that it doesn’t matter how people see me. Well, that sounds easier than it is, especially for a formerly shy person. Because the basis of my shyness, as with anyone’s, is a lack of confidence. And it’s impossible to gain confidence overnight. Especially when I make social blunders far more often than I ever did before (from too much talk but not enough social experience to do it properly). Those blunders reinforce the lack of confidence, instead of helping rid me of it.

It’s a process. And I’m working through it.


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Lake of Fear

4/5/2016

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Dreams that represent major life changes, and one in particular about stepping away from the exaggeration of fear.
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    Stan Burfield's Blog

    Organizer of London Open Mic Poetry. former support worker for people with autism and developmental disabilities.  former farm boy, former adventurer, former florist.
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