And then he quoted Nietzsche: “The degree of fearfulness is one measure of intelligence.” It was better than I had hoped. Cut the throttle and punch the dive brakes. “Fear is to recognize ourselves.” As far back as I could remember, every minute of my life had been an emergency in which I was paralyzed with fear. Feelings of fear, being at least in part cognitive, and therefore thoughts, often constitute knowledge. For instance, the knowledge that one is going to die. This is a fear one can have while lying in a hammock on a beautiful day. And it can lead to an emergency of feeling that often results in a poem.

Henry Nouwen writes, "Our own experience with loneliness, depression, and fear can become a gift for others, especially when we have received good care. As long as our wounds are open and bleeding, we scare others away. But after someone has carefully tended to our wounds, they no longer frighten us or others."

Writing a poem is one of many creative responses by which we care for our own wounds and share the gifts of care with others.  In the poetics of bread making or gardening or chopping wood, fear becomes as yeast, moist soil, or the sun of summer on a freezing cold night. Fear is energy.

The cognitive transformation of fear-as-emotion into fear-as-feeling is to domesticate what is threatening into a friend, a helper, even that which may save my life.