Fear vs. Wonder + Summer's Abundance... 🍒

“Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.” ~ Annie Dillard

Over the solstice weekend I drove through Summerland, a town in the interior of British Columbia where most of the province’s fruit and wine grapes grow. While the peaches and apricots were fuzzy green miniatures of themselves, the cherry trees were laden with crimson jewels.

Summerland runs alongside Lake Okanagan and lies next to Peachland. Don’t those two names conjure a sense of abundance? Across the lake sits Naramata and the Naramata Bench, a south facing ledge that produces some of the best wine in the region.

Surrounded by vineyards and orchards, especially those cherry trees full of ripe fruit, I marveled at the fact that every single tree provides hundreds if not thousands of pieces of fruit, and each piece of fruit carries the seed (or pit) of a potential tree. Every single tree carries the possibility of so many more trees, of so much more fruit. The idea made me happy, calm, and hopeful. Those feelings are harder to come by in a world going through so much chaos and change that fears are amplified, to say the least.

This got me thinking: staying in tune with the natural reality of abundance might be the antidote to the kind of scarcity mentality that underlies so many of our existential fears. Fears of loss, loneliness, pain, deprivation, conflict, danger. These are valid fears depending on circumstances, but have you ever noticed how so much of what we fear is “man made”? Most of our suffering comes from terrorizing and depriving each other.

Nature’s tune is abundance. Look at leaves on trees, blades of grade in meadows, mushrooms in forests—have you ever seen the many poppy seeds that come from a single flower’s seed head?! Though, at times, Nature weathers droughts, fires, floods, and blight, and such events impact abundance, it's not usually for too long. Eventually Nature recovers.

The myriad fears we humans suffer from, natural and manufactured, impact our minds to the degree that we seem to remain in a perpetual fear loop, creating more and worse fears for ourselves and each other. How do we recover?

We frequently say that love is the opposite of fear, its antidote, but where is the love? How do we access it? Why doesn’t it flow more freely and hold back the tides of too much fear? Fears breed desires for control and domination, for convoluted excuses to justify strategies we say are for safety but which often lead to violence and create even more fear. We might even say it’s a justification for love, that this end is worth justifying any means. But I’m not convinced.

I believe the true antidote to fear is wonder. It’s the missing link on the way to love. A kind of bridge. Without a restored state of wonder, love does not bloom.

In a state of wonder, we let go of our preoccupation with fear. For a moment, or longer, we align with the miraculousness of the world as it is. Vital, varied, and abundant.

After recognizing this in our surroundings, it’s not much of a leap to tune into that miraculousness in ourselves—and each other. A single breath sends oxygenated blood through our veins; a single smile lights up thousands of neurons in the brain of the smiler as well as the receiver of the smile; a single hug stimulates nerve endings and the release of hormones that trigger good and healing feelings.

We, too, are abundant aspects of Nature. Like the cherry tree, we bear the potential of much more than we at first appear to be. To quell fear—to not let it rot the fruit and wither the leaves of your life—nurture wonder. From there, it’s an easier leap to love.

"Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.” ~ Wayne Dyer

Cherry photo by Couleur from Pixabay