Familiar fears

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love." - Ranier Maria Rilke

How many of us live in reaving fear, lashing out to quell the many storms around us before they, in their own terrors lash out against us? How many of us, hushed into pale denial by the staggering immensity of our own self-loathing, seek so fanatically, so fervently to rend apart from the shaded lives of strangers, that very horror that we know lies treacherously within ourselves? It is as if the level of ferociousness our hatred carries is rivaled only by the depths of our fear and the starkness of our understanding. Though the ignorant may respond in fear to the unknown, it is the wise, the ones living in undeniable familiarity that must struggle between the freedom of a far-leaping grace and the temptation of an alluring, dark hate. As creatures whose passions rise and fall so easily upon life's capricious whims, we fall all too often within the grasp of our own hated weaknesses found in another. And thus, we do not always attack to win, we do not always fight to triumph or to survive; there are times when our desperate struggles are for nothing more than the sake of shattering mirrors so that we will not be haunted by our own familiar, lingering truth. Perhaps we have all become dragons of a sort, eagerly hunting each other down in our own desperation to end a self-afflicted misery too blind to accept love with grace, and so unable to offer it in turn to another. And so we shall remain, preying upon others in a constant attempt to flee from ourselves, until we finally grasp the courage to withstand such familiar, well-worn fears and to love and pull one another out of drowning shadows with a powerful grace whose soft touch carries with it it's own strong, forgotten familiarity as well.