I have yet to catch my stride in this new year, and after weeks, now, of feeling off-kilter, I’m finally chuckling at the fact that I continue to be caught off guard by…life. By the shiftiness of it. The movement. By how I can, repeatedly, have such clear, and what feel to me to be realistic, expectations that so clearly don’t get met. Or don’t get met in the ways I (clearly) expected them to be.

I could list so many examples, from job offers that were rescinded to schools that seemed perfect for my kids and then turned out not to be to friendships unexpectedly shifting or souring to holidays filled with hospital visits rather than play. The list goes on and on. And on. Surely your list is long, too.

My most current list item has been having way less time to work than I anticipated and the realization that the schedule I kept through 2011′s entirety isn’t one I’m capable of repeating: staying up late, getting up early, rinsing, repeating. I feel my body digging in at the thought of trying and my psyche shaking her head slowly. “Don’t do that this year. You can’t.”

Which is so disappointing from a certain point of view.

But see, I’m chuckling right now. Because this is so life. This. All of it. The longing, the disappointment, the wonder, the joy. The hurts and the heartaches. Missed expectations. The shifts where we thought we stood on solid ground.

And I’m noticing that even though I can’t be peaceful and content in all things, and even though I can’t always feel the hope or the goodness of this next thought: in ALL things, in every last one of them, there is the possibility of learning to trust.

And trust is what’s changing me in all the ways I want. Trust is what’s taking the roughest edges off my life’s game. Trust is what’s helping me recover so much faster from hurts and disappointments and punches in the gut than I ever could a year or five or twenty ago. Trust is opening me up to love, softening my cynical heart, helping me exhale more deeply and breathe in more fully and shift fear out of my driver’s seat so much more of the time.

So if trust can get grown and strengthened and fed and learned in all things… Well then.

Life? Dear shifting, untamed and untameable Life?

Bring it on!

I don’t even feel ready most of the time, but in this moment of what feels like lucidity, I say it with all my heart.

Bring it on.

Bring on the chances to learn how to trust.

______________________________

P.S. I just put the image above in my shop. If you’re interested, you can find it here.

P.P.S. I’m hard at work this month on a redesign of my site. I can’t wait to show it to you, likely early next week…if Life and I aren’t dancing some other direction. :)

I’ve been tripping on a secret, over and over, for the last many years. And it’s so profound that I shake as I try to put words to it. I’m that moved.

It’s all about our egos, and how they’re like the Wizard of Oz. Only instead of a powerless guy behind the scary facade, there’s something vast and spacious. Something that feels like floating on clouds and being utterly safe and fearing nothing at all. Dropping the facade terrifies the facade itself, and that terror drives all of us to do everything in our power to keep it up at all times.

But those glimpses beyond it? Those unexpected moments when we step to the side of it and feel our whole chest open up and the knots that are ALWAYS in our guts release and that cloud of chatter and worry and questioning quiet in a strength that feels more spacious and profound than anything we could ever hope to shore up or protect? Oh dear lord. Please, give me more.

I’m thinking a lot about spirituality these days, and about life paths (whether they be spiritual, relational, vocational, etc) that have turned out so differently from how we might have wished or expected that they would. And about how hard it can be to admit to ourselves that we aren’t on that path we used to be…or expected to be…walking, but are instead on the one that we’re on. That’s such a huge move, truly, to admit where we actually are.

But then there’s the move to admit that to other people, which can be hard enough on it’s own, depending on the audience. But all the more difficult when doing so has implications for choices and commitments we’ve already made. What if you’re a pastor and you admit that your concept of God cannot be integrously molded into anything your church could warm to? What if you’re engaged and you know deep down this person isn’t who you want to marry? What if you jumped through more hoops than you can count to reach a dream – sacrificed lots and gave years of your life to the work – and you realize once you’ve reached it that the dream was actually empty, or at least is empty for you?

The Wizard of each of our Oz’s shakes. It quakes. And tries to scare us into doing WHATEVER it takes to avoid the truth that we deep down know. To avoid the awful, awkward conversations required by it. The gut-wrenching choices that’ll have to be made. The fissures in relationships and chasms that’ll surely form in some of them.

“Doom and Gloom!!” our Wizards say. “Every last bit of it!!!”

But here’s where *I* quake and with something other than fear. I quake with the force of conviction.

You are not your Wizard.

Your ego is only a mask. It’s only a scary, boisterous story. And the actions and words you know you need to do or say are only dangerous and foolish and awful in the constricting world of that story.

Outside of that story, such things are LIFE – with enormous, capital letters. They’re freedom and flight. They’re you honoring what’s deep and beautiful and true, and connecting yourself with the growth and the learning that such honoring inevitably opens for you.

There are details that will have to be tended to. There are tough decisions that will have to be made. Relationships may break or need to be arduously mended. I don’t want to belittle any of that.

But I want to say with all the spacious, potent power within me that when it comes to listening to your soul and honoring the truth you hear it whispering, being a fool in your ego’s eyes is ultimately the safest, most hopeful, life-improving, trust-inducing move you could possibly make.

I’m cheering you on, with my pom-poms out for me, too, and all the ways all of us fear feeling foolish and try, with faltering steps sometimes, to dive into LIFE anyway.

With so much love,

P.S. This song might be something you need to hear (lyrics below).

Thanks so much to all of you who filled out the survey from last time! That helps so much as I plan next steps and try to find the sweet spot of overlap between my passions/expertise and the things you’d like to see more of here (the survey will remain open for another week, so please feel free to take it if you haven’t already).

Of the nearly 100 folks who filled the survey out, 81% said they want to tend trust around their spiritual path – a percentage far above the rest of the options available.

And I’m thrilled and intimidated, both, by the prospect of addressing it here. I have so much to say on this topic! – a rich history of experience and study to draw from. And (this is where the intimidation arises) up-close-and-personal knowledge of the fears that lurk in its shadows and the feelings, attitudes and actions that flow from such fears. I have wounded others in response to my fears. And I have been wounded.

The arc of my story isn’t unique, however, and I’d venture to guess the wounding and woundedness I know personally are echoes of nearly all of your own.

And too the deep yearning to feed and awaken the soul (however this is defined), and the intuition…and sometimes lived experience…that something beautiful and healing and good is part of each move toward that end – no matter how cleanly you fit religious or spiritual labels or not.

Life’s deepest fears and greatest capacity to set us free to live beyond them seem, to me, to be tangled up in this topic. So it makes all sense, on a sight like this, to start talking overtly about both.

First things…

I foresee orbiting this topic here in a periodic way. And I’m guessing that some of you might like to know where I’m coming from as we start (e.g. am I religious? do I have an axe to grind?). I plan to tell my spiritual story more personally in this week’s Trust Note (see sidebar if you don’t know what Trust Notes are already), but want to say a few things here as well.

First off, wherever you are on your spiritual path, I whole-heartedly bless you. I have no interest in unraveling your spiritual tradition if you have one, and count my work in life and here at this site as a life-long exercise in learning how to love and extend compassion to myself and those around me in ways that heal and enliven and empower, rather than discourage or tear down.

I have every interest in unraveling fear, however, and in tenaciously pushing into and past it in search of what Life beyond it can be.

I actually consider this is our greatest hope as a species. Our greatest calling. And if my spiritual story has any approximation to the human one of growth and discovery, I know that pushing into fear is not a frolic in the park, and that learning to live beyond it can involve a ton of work and pain.

But so can living mindlessly with it. And the latter lacks hope of a bright and beautiful future.

I see few other places where fear lurks as deeply and grippingly as it does around spiritual things – around relationships between people whose spiritual beliefs differ, around our thoughts about death and the afterlife, around our concepts of God/the Universe and the assumptions that come with them, around what can be lost if we listen, truly, to what our hearts are asking of us.

In light of all of this, and despite my own fears of taking the plunge (what if I offend you? what if you offend me? what if I alienate people who would otherwise be nourished here?), it seems to me that a site that’s all about tending trust is an important place to explore trust in relation to spiritual things (!).

So here we go! Periodically, we’ll do just that.

I wish you well and that wherever your fears lurk most grippingly, you catch glimpses beyond them to light your way.

P.S. Those who filled out the survey overwhelmingly spoke of Trust Notes as their favorite part of what happens here, so if you’re wondering whether you want to sign up for them, I don’t think you’ll regret it if you do.

I can hardly believe it, but one year ago today, with great hope and not a little trepidation, Trust Tending began. And what a tremendous year it’s been!! I’m grateful, tired, humbled, energized (yes, tired and energized, both!), satisfied, and filled with a sense that this – my work in this space – has only just begun.

I hope Trust Tending has been even a fraction as life-giving for you as it’s been for me, and that in coming weeks and months you find the offerings here even more reflective of the places you most hope your trust can grow.

As part of today’s celebration, I wonder whether you might consider taking a short, seven-question survey to help me get a better pulse on what people are liking, wanting, or wanting more of here? I’d be so grateful if you would! To me (and really to everyone who reads here in weeks and months to come), that’d be the best birthday present ever. :)

Click here for the short, anonymous survey.

Whether you take this survey or not, I’m so grateful for your presence here. I’m grateful for your company on this bumpy, trust-growing path, and for the wonderful challenge your presence is to me to continue on it with as much heart and…trust as I have to offer. There is so much more to come!! I cannot wait to share and experience it with you…

With all my heart,

Kristin

P.S. If you’re not a survey person, I’d still love to hear from you! I’d love to know who you are and what it is you come here for. What speaks to you here? What would you like to see more of? Comments or personal emails are equally welcome!

P.P.S. For those of you who wondered where my year-end reflections went last week, the answer is no where. :) They remain in my dear head, wishing for time to get put on a page.

While I watch for that, here are my favorite posts from 2011:

• Home in the dark
• On opening the heart
• Small steps into the wilds
• Staying with the discomfort of your power
• What change makers and rest of us need to hear
• Sexuality: Month-end reflections
• When hurry-up angst has you (a video post)
• Coping with death in all forms
• Letter from the universe
• Small acts of celebration
• And you find yourself in a soft place
• On impact
• It’s time

Happy New Year to you, even if what FEELS new to you is only your next breath. May this year (and this breath…and the next) hold riches for you, of the deepest, most trust-nourishing kind!

Whether you celebrate Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or nothing at all this month, I wish you well.

I wish you healing.
I wish your fears turn toward trust.
I wish you know yourself – without changing one blessed thing – dear and loved.
And that you have some sense, whether as a whisper in your heart or a sign across the sky, that your life matters, and that all you’ve experienced so far hasn’t been for naught.

This song, from Renee and Jeremy’s album C’mon, has been on repeat over here lots this year as I’ve thought about all of you and my deepest wishes for the work I do here. (Renee and Jeremy do some wonderful work. I hope you’ll consider supporting it!)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

And as a year-end gift, realizing holiday gatherings are imminent for many of you, I’m offering my ebook, Unspiking the Holiday Punch, at half price from now through Friday. Just use the coupon code wishingwell at check-out to have the discount applied.

I’ll be back next week with some year-end thoughts and look so forward to all the new year holds!

All my love to you,

Hi everyone,

Quick check-in tonight to say four things:

1. Thanks so much to all of you who have purchased Unspiking the Holiday Punch and for your positive feedback on it! (If you haven’t had a chance, you can check it out here.) I hope your coming weeks are filled with much more ease and self-kindness because of it!

2. I was honored to be hosted by Andrea Scher and Marianne Elliott this week (my article at Superhero Journal is here, and the one at Zen Peacekeeper is here). If you haven’t met these women already, I hope you’ll check out their sites. Both are trust tenders through and through, and strike a remarkable balance between sharing honestly about their own fears and challenges and doing so in ways that invite you into the frame, to explore your own life more honestly and find threads of hope and trust there, too.

3. If you’re new to this site, my warmest welcome! I’m actively planning for ways to make this space a fuller reflection of the community that gathers here, but in the meantime, here are a few ways you might wish to connect and/or understand what happens here better:

• This page is list of topics that have been given extensive attention here. Click on any of them to be taken to an annotated page of the articles written on that topic. I’m currently considering reinstating monthly topics and welcome any opinions any of you have to give on that.
• If you haven’t already signed up for Trust Notes (in the side bar), those are my weekly notes meant to connect more personally with readers than often happens on the blog. I send out short reflections, meditations, and sometimes downloadable sketches all aimed at nourishing trust. As part of that sign-up, you receive a free ebook that’s all about tending trust while spending time online. You can read more about that book here.
• Finally, you can find Trust Tending on Facebook here and on Twitter here.

4. This last point has nothing to do with selling anything or signing up for anything and everything to do with love. I’m feeling the hush that’s coming over the internet as people turn toward physical responsibilities during this holiday season. I’m feeling the restlessness, too, and some of the growing angst people are feeling around lots and lots of things (family time, gift buying, trip planning, financial worry).

And I feel so much love for all of us as we go about our business of being human through this time. It can be really, really hard! So I want you to know that as I meditate each morning (don’t be scandalized; I’m talking 10-15 minutes here), I’m picturing all of you surrounded by kindness and gentleness and peace – things that can feel absent in the hustle of traffic and to-do’s, not to mention all the feelings getting evoked at this time of year.

I don’t know what effect this practice has on your experience. But I hope at the very least it’s a comfort to know that someone is thinking of you daily, holding you in love.

Warmly yours,

For the last several weeks I’ve been thinking lots about holidays, and particularly the challenges most of us face as we gather with and relate with extended family. As with the challenges of parenting, I feel a collective hush when it comes to admitting openly that a) we love our families and b) it’s often hard to be with them. That the two aren’t mutually exclusive is a sign I’d like to wear around my neck. An idea that has the same effect on me as a wonderfully deep exhale.

One of the lessons I’ve learned the hard way is that challenging family time is made far worse when we don’t or can’t treat our own selves kindly. When, because of our own self-critical thoughts, shame, or impatience, we aren’t safe for us to be around, it’s difficult to nurture safe relationships with others. Fear and insecurity get bounced back and forth between everyone until no one knows where they started or how they can hope to end.

I’m delighted to offer you my heart-felt effort to help both things calm down. It’s an ebook for purchase called Unspiking the Holiday Punch: A Trust Tending guide to self-kindness before, during, and after extended family time.

I wrote it with the hope of sharing some of the tools I’ve collected over the last many years for loving myself and my family with more courage, more strength, and more ease than I naturally knew.

I hope you’ll come see! :)

I keep having this urge to write posts that leave you feeling hugged and safe and warm. Life has so many rough edges that my instinct is to make this space totally edge-free.

But lately every time I sit to write and quiet myself to hear what needs to be said, I feel edges. Not scrape-you-up edges, but the kind that hold tension. The kind that are the good sort of push to get us (I’m very much included in this “us”) to grow in the ways we desire.

So here’s what I’m hearing tonight:

We’re at the start of the busiest holiday season. And for many of us, that means a season when centeredness and clarity and awakening take back stage to everything urgent (events! what to wear to events! gift buying! home decorating! food prep! travel/hosting planning! worrying about interpersonal dynamics that will happen at imminent gatherings! worrying about not having any imminent gatherings! etc!).

And I think there’s really a time for everything under the sun, including a time for inner things, and a time for intense external focus; a time to be fluffy and celebrative, and a time to contemplate deeply.

But here’s the edge:

I think nearly all of us know one or more practices that help us feel more trusting, stable, and sane, and I think most of us assume there’s an unavoidable pause button on that practice (or those practices) when the tyranny of the urgent hits hard.

When life turns up its flame – and even when our OWN lives aren’t particularly hectic but we’re surrounded by that vibe – we pause things like eating greens, keeping our sugar and alcohol intake sane, meditation and prayer, exercise, sleep…

I’m not saying it’s possible to do all of these things and the hundred other things we have on our plates right now to do.

But I do think we can pick one (and sometimes more than one) of the things we know help us feel good, and do that thing all the way through this season.

In all honesty, as I listen, I feel an urgency to us doing what we can to lean into our best selves. There isn’t fear or judgment behind this urgency so much as a sense that we need the strength and trust of our most awake, alive selves to take us where we need to go – individually and collectively. It’s a sense that now is not the time to sit back and wait until spring or summer or five or ten years from now to do what we know we need to do.

(And I really am talking about the simplest things we know are ours to do. For me, this is prioritizing sleep more than I have been and meditating daily.)

I don’t know “where it is we need to go” – I have no woo woo visions to share with you there. I simply have what I hear as I quiet myself and open myself to whatever needs to be said. And this – all that I’ve said so far – is what I’m hearing.

I want to be clear on something, though: self-kindness and self-compassion feel way at the top of the list of important practices to incorporate into this season (and always). So if your efforts to stay trusting, stable, or sane feel anything like whips or judgmental finger-wagging, please do what you can to close your inner door to them. And to take a different tact entirely.

Like:

Choose one practice that you sense is important for you to maintain through this season and treat it like you might treat breathing meditation: maintain it until you notice yourself not maintaining it (just like you might notice yourself not aware of your breath), give yourself a smile and a warm nod once you notice, and then pick the practice back up.

No judgment. No scandal at not maintaining the practice. Just the commitment to try again (and again and again) (…and again :) whenever you notice you’ve strayed from your course.

What could happen if you did that? Or I? How much trust might get grown? How different might our experience of these next few weeks be?

If you’re someone who likes edges and you want some loving butt-kicking in order to do your practice, watch this video for inspiration and then go find yourself some help. Or use Marianne’s R-rated rant to pump you up for whatever it is you know you need to do.

And above and beneath it all, know yourself loved. If that sounds hokey or hollow, I don’t think you strange. My hokey/hollow alarm is triggered lots by such things.

But they are the truth I know to say right now. They’re the words that I hear in my heart and the feeling I feel so strongly.

You are loved.

You’re okay.

And the time is now to keep waking up.

+ + + + + + + +

P.S. I’m putting finishing touches on a little ebook called Unspiking the Holiday Punch: A Trust Tending guide for self-kindness before, during, and after extended family time – all about self-kindness practices to get you through challenging interpersonal holiday time. Watch for its unveiling next Wednesday, December 7th!

Last weekend we had a house full of guests – people I love dearly and was so glad to have here. I’m an introvert, though, so by the end of the weekend, I was drained.

I also spend about a week of every menstrual cycle oscillating between irritable, vulnerable, and ready to cry. It’s almost laughably predictable. And of course last weekend I was smack in the middle of it.

So when my husband and I sat down for a quick check-in Sunday night before watching a movie and ended up launching into a difficult conversation…and then again, on a different topic, once the movie was through, I was a total basket case. One thousand cases of basket.

At one point the shame of crying at an odd conversational moment took me over and I held a kleenex over my face, trying to collect myself. “Good thing I have NO IDEA what’s going on back there,” my husband said. We had a good laugh, which of course sent me back into tears.

And it occurs to me that isn’t this just how life is sometimes? Impervious to “good timing”? We don’t always have a choice about when hard conversations happen. We can’t push pause on injury, disaster, or disease. We can’t predict when the bumps in life’s road are gonna throw us and then adequately prepare in advance for them.

We’re simply reacting a lot of the time. And, often, without the luxury of adequate sleep, an hour spent meditating that morning, the absence of other life stressors, and a green drink just consumed.

In many ways I’ve grown more trust than the average bear, and have collected a nice array of tools for understanding my own psychology and navigating interpersonal things. But damned if I wasn’t about age three on Sunday night, spouting tears and fears like this isn’t my website at all. Like I’ve never heard of such a place. I was humiliated. And ashamed of feeling that, too!

I’m not feeling that way tonight (thank God!), and with the benefit of both distance AND proximity to that kind of shame, I wonder whether it might nourish trust for me and anyone in the midst of or trying to recover from similar feelings to say some things that I know.

So here goes:

• I know that it’s okay to be triggered into old feelings and childlike personas. Such triggers are part of the human experience. Which means ALL of us have them.
• I know that our egos really want to paint and project a unified image of who we are (e.g. mature, trusting, having access to higher functions of reason…), and that when we act outside the range of that image, our egos freak out. They scold us or scoff us or wilt in dismay – anything to try to get us back on track with the image.
• We are not images. And more importantly, we are not unified beings. We have many sides to us. Many feelings. Many parts with not-always-synchronized wishes.

  (There, there, now, ego. I must tell you it’s true.)

• Week-before-period-starts personas don’t cancel out the rest-of-the-month ones. And vice versa. We’re all (all our personas) in this together. (God bless all our souls.)
• Scrappy, jungle-ball conversations or entire life seasons are just what have to happen sometimes. They aren’t pretty. They aren’t elegant. They beg no photographic record.

  But there they are.

• And wow, do you have any idea the potential for love in the midst of them? – love that shines like the radiant outline of sun behind the darkest, crappiest cloud. Love that isn’t pity or about performing to some standard, but about taking a person as they are, being taken as the person that you are, and finding softness in response. Warmth. Kindness.
• Sometimes the love and shining linings happen way later. In the moment, and sometimes for days or weeks or years at a time, there’s only scrap.
• And I know, deep in my heart of hearts, that all of that’s okay.
• And that this letter always applies.

What do you know that might grow trust in the times when life catches you at your worst? Wanna help make this list longer?

Let’s say you’re afraid of something. Maybe big, maybe small. Maybe the very heart of the work you feel is yours to do right now.

Whatever it is, it scares you.

And let’s say there’s a story around this thing that you fear:

• If I try it, I’ll fail and end up worse off than if I don’t try at all.
• If I succeed, everyone I care about will resent me and I’ll find myself alone.
• I’ll never find someone I connect with deeply.
• I’m unhelpably stuck.
• I will always feel this way.
• I can’t find the money.
• I don’t have enough time.

So you have this story, and you feel like it’s the only possible story to tell. There’s even a part of you that likes this story – how familiar it’s become. How predictable. How it covers you somehow, makes you feel less exposed.

And let’s say part of the comfort of this story is watching for corroborating evidence and finding it. Hah! See? The story’s true!

You find the evidence so you tell the story more, adding weight and weight and more weight to it from all that evidence until the neuro-pathway in your brain between that story and that fear is a Grand Canyon-shaped crevasse.

The neurons don’t even have to think when it comes to what to do with this fear. The story. Always tell the story.

But what if.

What if your fear itself is just a point of view?

What if you walked around to the other side of it and imagined what someone with more hope than you currently have might see? Or someone who isn’t religious or spiritual. Or who totally is. Someone who’s been through the fire and lived to tell the tale. Someone who’s been around the block of your particular fear and found a way to another route?

What would they say? What stories could they tell about you?

(No, really. Coming up with an actual answer to this can knock your socks right off.)

Or what story would your own wise self – the one you hope to be in 15 or 30 years – tell you in the face of this fear?

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

If you’ve read here these last months, you’re aware that I’m in a season of inner expansion, of stepping more fully into my power…and that I’ve been doing so tremblingly.

Because as much as I feel called to this work and like my life has been a grooming for it, I have internalized a story around success that goes something like: Stepping into my power will cause me to lose the friendship and support of all the people that I love.

Wonderful, right?

And totally triggered whenever I taste success.

Last month I attended Tara Sophia Mohr’s retreat and one of the exercises we did was to pair up with a partner and look her square in the eyes. Without speaking, each of us was to look for the “light” in our partner – the light that isn’t synonymous with the physical body. The light that some call spirit or soul.

We did this for a few minutes.

We were then instructed to look, again without speaking, for our OWN light in that person’s eyes. To see our own spark in them.

And then, finally, after more minutes had passed, to wordlessly wish our partner well. To send her whatever blessing we felt moved to send.

WOOOEEE, that experience left me undone. Tears streamed down my face the whole time. I felt as if my fears of abandonment and disconnection melted into a warm pool in that stare, and I saw – no, felt – what it is to be safe. To feel as if “Don’t leave me!” and “What if I find myself alone?” make no sense at all. Are words that float like dust in the space beyond the Whole that is you and me and everyone else together. If, indeed, there’s any space beyond Us at all.

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

My point is not to preach about oneness, though.

My point is to name an experience where a story I’ve been telling myself for a lifetime suddenly got unveiled as just that: a story. And one I no longer wish to tell.

I’m not cured of my story. Neuro pathways run deep. But I’m now recognizing that story for what it is and doing the conscious work of telling a different one whenever I find my mind slipping into it.

As I step into my power, I will be more supported and less alone has become my new mantra.

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

Last week I wrote about sensing the time is ripe for us to address the intimacy issues we all carry around. And I’m wondering whether it might be revolutionary, in that very task, to recognize the stories we tell about ourselves and our real or imagined significant others – and even about the possible paths that our lives and relationships might take – and to listen with a new kind of interest for which of them are ones we want to lay down.

Which of those stories have become less security blankets and more scratchy, too-tight clothes.

Which have become less inevitabilities and more mere points of view?

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

What are you most afraid of? What story about that are you wanting, with growing awareness, to tell?