One Step Backward Taken - the theraputic value of fear

April 16, 2009

One Step Backward Taken - the theraputic value of fear

The week before I took a break to move I gave an address on a poem by Robert Frost called One Step Backward Taken. My computer died and took the file with it. Fortunately I had a hard copy and, re-reading it, it seems to me worth offering you a pdf of it. You can find it here.

Andrew James Brown

My name is Andrew James Brown. I’m a philosophically/theologically inclined writer with deep sympathies towards Imaoka Shin’ichirō's understanding of a creative, inquiring, free and liberative religion/spirituality (jiyū shūkyō 自由宗教), Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism, Konkokyo, Christian non-theism, D. G. Leahy’s “thinking now occurring for the first time”, a Lucretian inspired religious naturalism, new materialism and Kyoto School philosophy; also a photographer, cyclist, walker and jazz bass player. In addition to this, I’m the minister of a small, liberal, free religious community in Cambridge (UK)

Comments

Yewtree said…

Excellent. I and another Pagan were participating in a discussion on the blog of a naturalist/atheist, and we said that being connected to Nature was a good thing; but he said "but nature is a bitch" (citing earthquakes etc) and accused us of being naïve. But the Pagan view of nature is that She is beautiful AND terrible (Venus AND Mars, as you put it, though some of us might say maiden, mother & crone). But there is no intentionality behind the beauty and the terror; they just are.

But you have added to this idea very well with your image of the man standing on a cliff, and showing how fear and gratitude are connected. Thanks.

17 April 2009 at 13:34