= The Fear and the Amoeba =
== David ==
Writing here is so frightening for many of those who ride my internal [[../The_Bus|greyhound]]. Deep in my youngest parts lives a desperate need to belong. In a literal sense, when I was very young, I could not survive without my family's care, so to lose the sense of belonging was ultimate disaster. Babies don't know how to cook, so for a baby, to be left alone means death.
As an infant, I was sometimes left in my crib to cry myself to sleep. I know this because my father has told me the story, with some pride in his voice about how my mother and he were endlessly sleep deprived waking thought the night to comfort me in my crying until one night he convinced my mother to let me cry myself to sleep. "The first night was very hard, you cried for hours, but after that one night, you slept thought the night," as my father tells it.
Over the years, many layers have grown around this deep longing and fear. The one who believes I need to cry silently. The one who says there is something deeply wrong with me and I must learn to pretend, to present the world with a false more acceptable facade of me. The one who believes I can earn belonging by perfect performance, or unbridled mental brilliance. The one who arranges my world so that other people depend on me, thinking that if I am needed, I will never be pushed out into the feared coldness of alone.
In my mid twenties, I found peace for a time on my bicycle, pedaling solo from Snyder, TX to El Portal, CA. I belonged to my bike and the road, and my nightly campfire, and my blue plastic tarp bivvy. There were days when I encountered fascinating people, effortlessly connected, sometimes traveled together for a stretch, then departed with the same effortless joy. But when I eventually landed in Berkeley to set up my New Life, my sense of contented belonging broke down, anxiety returned full force. My efforts to fit into society off the road all fell short.
And now, so many years later, in my love with Monica, in meditation, in dance, in SoulWork, in Kirtan, in becoming a parent of adult children my journey has spiraled back round to another iteration of the kind of belonging I felt on that bicycle journey across the desert southwest. Somehow, on that journey, the anxious grasping parts which had grown up around my fear, were quiet. Perhaps the environment of the open road left them with nothing to grasp onto.
