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    Letters of Fear and Love
    Letters of Fear and Love
    Letters of Fear and Love
    Ebook188 pages1 hour

    Letters of Fear and Love

    By Sophia E. Aguiñaga

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    About this ebook

    Letters of Fear & Love is an investigation into love. We've heeded commentators on finding and keeping love, expressing love, and building up self love - all with varying degrees of success. Hollywood offers us fantasy love, something we'd do best to not take seriously. Science and psychology reference pain and pleasure, which we can follow logically to the root of human behavior. Yet, the experiential aspect is up to us to decipher.

    For many, love remains a source of fear, confusion, and suffering. Aguiñaga encourages us to ask ourselves why, and imagine how we can redefine love for the better. The answers may lie beyond current societal constructs, media, psychology, and science. This eclectic compilation of poetry, philosophical prose, and love letters invites you to explore alongside her, through the heights and depths of redefining love on her own terms.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateNov 5, 2017
    ISBN9781543916706
    Letters of Fear and Love

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      Book preview

      Letters of Fear and Love - Sophia E. Aguiñaga

      Love

      Dearest Reader,

      How lovely it is to meet you here. There are no mistakes, and there aren’t even coincidences. Perhaps, at your core, there is a certainty, a decision to propel, even if the grandeur of it is yet to be understood. Perhaps, on the other hand, you are well on your way. It is my privilege and pleasure to be part of your unique and exceptional journey.

      I don’t want to love you for your potential; I don’t want to change you. I want to love you immediately and truly, right where you are, whatever you’re going through. Whether you have lied or cheated, helped or healed, and surely, you’ve done all. You are so beautifully human, and you are okay, exactly where you are. Every step you are taking is the step you need to be taking, and you’ll see it once you get where you’re going.

      I love the person you are now; I love the person you are becoming. In these very moments, you are without a single thing to feel ashamed for, and I love you.

      That said, you would do well to view me as an ally, not a teacher. I claim none of this book to represent ultimate Truth. Rather, please accept these pages as an account of my own journey and investigation. At most, the words you read have been true in my perspective at some point in time. If the words or concepts cause confusion or deflect from Truth in any manner, it is due to my own confusion and expressive inadequacy.

      Most importantly, employ a sense of examination with this book and your journey. Curiosity and discrimination will be your guards as you explore. Thus, I am your ally, but you are your own Way. My highest wish is that this sharing may support and comfort you as you move closer and closer to discovering your own understanding and expression of Truth and Love.

      Thank you for choosing to join me on my journey and, by doing so, allowing me to join you on yours.

      With the utmost respect, encouragement, and reverence, I remain humbly yours.

      Love,

      Sophia

      You are

      visual

      moving

      dancing

      sensual

      weeping

      laughing

      bleeding

      poetry

      Some have theorized that, at base, there are only two true human drivers: pain and pleasure. The more poetic of us may prefer fear and love. For now, as we get to know each other, let’s assume these theories are true. It follows that any feeling we experience could only be an extension of one of these two drivers.

      Anger, for instance, may be inherently kindled by a drive to protect or defend something we are afraid to lose, because pain is loss’s shadow. Our most ecstatic moments may root to a sense of meaningful contribution or appreciation. Cooking a meal for a loved one, creating art, volunteering for a greater cause can all deepen our sense of gratitude. Gratitude awakens our sense of purpose, usually followed by a radiant swelling in the chest. Could that be love? Even the Grinch knows how that feels.

      Many great minds have concluded that fear can be completely driven out by love, and by love alone. Naturally, if given the choice, most of us would consciously choose to act from love. Well, do we?

      It’s easy to deduce: do we find ourselves most often happy or sad, joyous or angry, faithful or anxious, generous or miserly, smiling or frowning? If we look beyond ourselves to our society, our cultures, and our world at large, we can also see which driver dominates our collective. What do you see?

      From an early age, I felt the fear being taught to me by those who had been taught to be afraid by those who had also been taught to be afraid; it was a cycle. My young heart somehow knew better than to assume this fear as my own. I wanted to love and to be loved, and to help others choose love as well, but I struggled immensely as I grew. Was it upbringing, DNA, media, societal agreements, peer pressure, some other external force? It was all of them. I found myself imitating harmful patterns, sometimes hurting others, which consequently hurt me.

      Clearly wanting it wasn’t enough, so what caused the disconnection? Sure, we might consciously choose love, but the integral word is consciously. Then what was happening unconsciously?

      Determined that I was more than these tendencies, that somehow, I could exist beyond them, I began a lifelong journey. My circumstances and the people around me revealed nothing new, so I traveled to foreign terrain. Voyaging inward, I began to write about what I found, and kept writing based upon a marvel of a discovery: if I knew true love was missing, it was because I was comparing myself and the rest of the world to something. What was the reference point?

      The reference point lay dormant inside me. Fear felt dissonant because underneath it, at my core, was an untapped love aching for reflection. Writing became excavation. Without knowing it then, I set out to write and write and write, until I could access that love uninterrupted.

      I’ve begun to define what it means to love and be loved rightfully, and slowly eliminate tendencies which obstruct that love’s expression. Though, the excavation seems eternal. It is now my chosen challenge to find more creative, expansive, and accurate ways to describe and express the love pulsing inside me, and I’ll die trying.

      Thus, I present to you a collection of these writings – poetry, philosophical prose; and conversations with and letters to friends, family, lovers, all of humanity, Eternity, and, finally, myself. Allow these pages to fall open and speak to you as they will; the story line is nonlinear. Few true love stories are.

      My story begins in the confinements of the dark, as all seeds to sprout must. I can’t help but imagine our journeys are similar – darkness looks the same to all of us: pitch black. Have you ever felt yourself grasping for something you can’t quite define? Every time you come close to something or someone, all you can see is how clearly the bill is not fit – not this time, perhaps never.

      Maybe, like me, you have plastered your depiction of ideal love onto the face of a lover. Perhaps we’ll find what we ache for in the hungry glances of a suitor, our iPhones and morning lattes. Someday the unconditional acceptance we crave will wink at us from the bottom of our wine glass, if we can just drink enough of it. And, maybe it will. Absolutely anything is possible.

      Meanwhile, let’s explore the possibility of ceasing our grasping for long enough to identify what the grasping represents. If we are grasping for something, according to our theory earlier, are we acting out of fear or love? Of course, the answer is fear. We would only handcuff to ourselves what we fear to lose; what we love, we would share freely and with pleasure.

      Because we are meeting here, there is no question that you have grown weary of the fear and grasping. As you seek to understand, my wish is that on nights when you need an ally through the darkness, you will find these words as an understanding, compassionate friend by your side. During your brightest of days, you can find them even still, ever encouraging you on your path to finding love within all your surroundings by first finding it in yourself.

      Dear stranger, I invite you to witness my unfolding, a process which will never be complete. I blossom before you as a reminder that you are not alone. We all begin in the darkness.

      Indeed, I have hunted, cried, begged, settled, and devalued myself until I was convinced I might find the label of love lying on the beach waiting for me. Etched in pieces of driftwood, outlined in seafoam shaking to death in the wind. I’ve fallen flat on my face in front of an endless ocean of waves crashing toward me; and even with all her power and all my fear, the ocean has moved to do nothing but help me stand back up.

      You see, even the shame of realizing we live in darkness is a bright and beaming ray of grace from the light, because now we know there is an option. And so, I introduce myself to you in the most genuine way I know how: from darkness to light.

      Please, receive the spectacle with gentleness, as you would want another to be gentle with you. I am willing to be so vulnerable, for the possibility of inspiring you to be vulnerable as well. That courage to be genuine is precisely what will bring us closer to the love we seek.

      Truly, and always so.

      I am writing to remember each moment is quiet and each moment is perfect. Each moment contains balance: equal amounts of energy; masculine and feminine, light and dark, noise and silence, pain and pleasure, hindrance and advantage.

      If I ever forget, if I ever feel longing, I want to be reminded that in every moment, if I can will myself to stay in it, there is everything I could possibly need. If I become distracted, I want to be reminded everything exists now and only now. While I move throughout the planes, all I seek stays exactly in one place and is never far away, so long as I can focus.

      Is every possibility not

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