F.e.a.r.

I have heard many friends say that fear stands for either; fuck everything and run, or face everything and recover. For some reason I was pondering the word fear on my run today. My route takes me down a highway and eventually I veer off to a portion of the Appalachian Trail. For some strange reason I can run on the road, no problem, even when you can see the driver applying makeup or changing the radio station and coming just a tad too close for comfort. But when I head down the trail, immediately thoughts of saber toothed tigers and grizzly bears invade the serenity of the woods. Each twig snapping is not a squirrel, but a rabid fox, that will take me down with its bloodied fangs. I miss the lush green that shifts to wetlands within a quarter mile, because my brain is on overdrive. I pant to the top of the hill to the road and semi trucks that somehow seem safer than the dark of the forest. I wanted to create a new acronym for fear, and the only positive one that I came up with was, Find Every Abundance Radiantly. Now I do not know if that makes any sense to you, but it does for me. I was in a most beautiful part of the trail, the path was soft with pine needles, I crossed over a brook filled with cattails, and ran through moss covered rocks and ivy. I did not see the abundance that surrounded me, on all sides. I chose to feel fear, fear of mauling by extinct species at that. Today, for the rest of the day I choose to find each and every abundance radiantly. If not radiant then what?