Realizing God's Will Is Oneness

Recapturing My Treasure

When I was a little girl, I lived in Morgantown, West Virginia with my family.  My father’s parents owned a little farm outside of town that I visited often.  I remember wandering over the cow pastures for hours on end.  I was a curious child and loved to explore.  The only fear I knew was of insects and other crawly creatures.  My grandmother had a large vegtable garden and every morning in the summer she would go out to pick bugs and worms off her vegtables and put them in a little can of kerosene that she carried.  She was a true organic gardner before there was such a term.  In order to keep me from wandering off while she was busy gardening, she would put me on a kitchen stool with an umbrella to shade me in the middle of the garden, knowing that I would not get down because I would have to walk through the buggy garden.  There I sat stupified by my fear and in awe of my grandmother’s courage as I saw it.  Naturally, we talked about my unfounded fear and my grandmother did her best to help me see things differently.  I can only say that she was not terribly successful regarding “curing” me.  Still, I didn’t see this fear as being me,  it was just something that was there, but partly outside of me.

When I was five years old in 1950, I came to know powerful fear.  I was to start school and had to take the city bus across town to get there.  My mother could not take me every day because she had to care for younger brothers and sisters, plus in those days my parents had no second car.  My mother taught me to use the bus system and even at those tender years, they exhibited great confidence in my ability to handle the circumstances quite well.  I expressed my great fear but to no avail, my mother went with me the first few days but then I was on my own.  Of course, I did my “duty” the best I could, and eventually I was emboldened to wander even farther than I ever previously did, whether in town or on the farm.  However this fear was different for it seemed that even though I overcame it in one sense because I had to fight it and move forward, it didn’t seem separate from me.

When I read the Course’s statement that my body is a learning device, not a lesson, I try to retrace the steps of my life to determine where I first remember feeling really caught by fear that changed me. I always come back to this time when I was very young and these formative experiences.  Sometimes in our earliest life events we can see how ego mind intrudes on our innocence and grips us with an iron hand of fear.  Our body is no longer a learning device to explore the world around us, no longer simply a tool to learn from experiences.  Ego is not satisfied with anything less than mind numbing fear and hard lessons of body discomfort.  Ego crushes our body with fear so that we cannot separate from it easily.  We now mistakenly think the fear is us.  We embody fear.

When I review those simple days of long ago,  I remember the carefree attitude of my early youth.  I remember feeling so connected to something good as I wandered about the countryside.  I had no worries or gripping fears.  I simply was.  I learned from where I was and what I was doing.  It was all good.  As I grew older I became attached to fears and everything became a lesson to do well, an endless series of questions about doing or being anything good enough.  I forgot that my life, my body, is a learning device, and that learning is a good in itself.  Everything is good enough to learn from because it is simply there for our learning.

Today, more and more, I try to recapture that attitude of being a carefree learner, free to wander the journey of life with all its seeming fears and travails, as well as delights, with the same same sense of ease and peace.  More and more I try not to “make” things hard for myself, not to “make” lessons that seem insurmountable and overwhelming.  Each instance is an opportunity to learn from, nothing more.  Each instance is a chance to see love at work in my life, not fear.  I wish I could say that I never felt fear anymore, but that is not true.  But, now when I feel fear I can see it more outside of myself as I used to do long ago.  It is not me but it is there to learn from.  It has only been in the past five years, since really digging into ACIM work, that I have been able to give up fighting my fears and to more peacefully learn from them what they have to teach.  As I do this they dissolve more and more.  I no longer need to physically wander to feel free.  I can be free in my mind.  My grandmother, I am sure, is so proud.

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