I have a friend who is very afraid of heights.  He gets nervous, then panicked, then actually shuts down in the face of any kind of perceived open exposure to unprotected high places.

I don’t share his fear at all. I am known as the photojournalist who will climb on, or fly in, anything without any hesitation, to get a picture, or, sometimes, just to be doing it.

This isn’t fair, because neither my friend nor I are in any real danger. The fear for him is instinctive, and irrational.

But consider this: spiders freak me out. I feel a very visceral, very instinctive, revulsion to them, and I always have. I am especially freaked out by spiders that are rubbery or have no logical means of locomotion. It is so irrational.

This irrationality makes even less sense when you consider this: I am completely unafraid of crickets. Lately, there have been an unusual number of crickets – I learned only tonight that they are called camel crickets – in the house. Here’s why it is so irrational: this insect is very similar in size, color, and markings to a wolf spider. But I am fine with them. Tonight, in fact, I picked one up (the one in the photo) and posed it next to a penny for scale. Then I picked it up again and tossed it into the front yard.

I could no more make myself do that with a wolf spider than I could a coiled viper or attacking bear. Wolf spiders are actually doing good work in my house by hunting and eating unwelcome insects, and they are absolutely as harmless as the cricket, but any that I see are terminated with extreme prejudice.

Please, dear reader, explain this paradox.

I sometimes wish I were less transparent. I sometimes wish I were more of a mystery. It seems like my feelings are so obvious, and that the vulnerability from it could be dangerous.

I was at a store recently. My former photography student Devon was behind the counter.

“You look sad,” she said.
“I am sad,” I replied.
She’d held me up to the light, and could see right through me.
“Why?” she asked.
“I miss my wife.”

A recent poem from my journal:

that pose that we all have when we look in the mirror
is why we are surprised when we come across a mirror we we weren’t expecting
who is that in the mirror?
I no longer have that pose
who is that in the mirror?
stop being me in the mirror

“I am not the body you seen before you. Nor am I the soul inside. I am all the things I have said and done, and all the things I failed to say and do. I have said too much and done too little.” ~Journal, November 1990

I went to see a long-ago friend recently. We sat on the couch in her living room and talked. I told her about my feelings about Abby and the last year of her life. I asked her to hold my hand, and to hold me in her arms for a few minutes, which she did.

“It was intimate,” I told another long-time friend later.
“You had sex with her???”
No, no I didn’t. Intimacy isn’t a synonym for sex.

It made me wonder why so many people only perceive intimacy as sexual intimacy, and how that might even make sex non-intimate.

So, then, Richard, what do you mean by “intimate”?

Caring for a child is intimate. Caring for a dying person is intimate. Respecting someone is intimate.

One aspect of intimacy I learned in the past couple of years is the very real intimacy of caring for someone who cannot care for themselves. They are wearing an involuntary vulnerability.

Another friend of mine is at the start of a very intense relationship, and she expressed to me that she wants to say, “I love you,” but is afraid it might be burdened with consequences. I felt that same way when I was much younger, but “I love you” comes easy to me now, from the all-day, every-day “I love you” my wife and I expressed so easily, to the more casual “I love you” for my friends that are simple, welcome, and can make a difference.

Don’t be afraid of “I love you.” But yes, it is vulnerable.

An issue came up at one of my civic clubs (the name of which I am withholding) recently. At a meeting in June, the Board voted to change the weekly meeting to include a moment of silence instead of a prayer, which historically was always a Christian prayer that included Jesus.

Some of the members claimed they objected to this change because the board made it without consulting the membership, though most of us knew this wasn’t their real objection.

On July 1, a new Board took office, which included me. We considered this action, and decided that yes, we would put it to a vote of the membership. The president emailed ballots, and at our meeting last week, we voted. The choices were 1. prayer only 2. moment of silence only 3. prayer followed by a moment of silence and 4. a “Faith Moment.”

“Faith Moment was presented by one of our own, Richard Barron,” the president said in her email. “He proposed that the (our club) create an itinerary item called the Faith Moment, in which the president or other member conducting the meeting could call upon any members wishing to express their faith. That member could express their faith in the form of prayer, religious thought, or reading from scripture. This segment of the meeting would be open to and include expressions from any faith or belief system, as long as that expression did not deliberately exclude the faith of other members, or contain hate speech or other inflammatory content, as determined by the President. This segment would be limited to 2 minutes.”

I thought this suggestion hit all the right notes for 2022: diversity, equality and inclusion. Surely we would adopt this, and everyone would be happy. I was ready to accept my Nobel Peace Prize.

Sadly, despite my notion that this compromise would work, it was not to be. Though the vote was close, “moment of silence only” was the verdict. My own piece of brilliance received the fewest votes.

As that was announced, four members immediately claimed they would resign, including one who barked, “how can you have (this club) without god.”

So, sure, I have some ideas about this, so let’s start with the most basic: people who are genuinely afraid of the real world.

The urgent, angry, frightened need to control all functions of society like church doesn’t speak of faith, confidence, or trust, but of insecurity, especially insecurity about the fragile house of cards you truly know is your faith.

That faith isn’t constructed by god, by the way, but for centuries by kings and lords and presidents who want your obedience, and, most importantly, your money.

“Why wasn’t God there that day at Columbine? Because God isn’t allowed in the schools.” ~Actual letter to the editor (Sidebar: just this week I wrote a news story about “Rachel’s Challenge,” a program started in memorial of Rachel Scott, the first victim killed at Columbine.)

I love quotes like this because they are such a blunt admission that god is powerless to stand up to school boards.

So really, the small people were the ones who objected. They have small ideas. They have a small world view. They are the people who are afraid of other beliefs, and especially to have other beliefs in their midst.

The idea that all our institutions have to be your church is a very toxic idea.