Do you remember the first time you felt fear?
The first time I experienced fear, I’m talking real fear, the kind that makes the heart race and constricts the throat and freezes the bones, I was waking from a dream. About snakes. Hundreds of them writhed and rattled ominously at the bottom of a huge nest.
My first primordial dream!
Fear is one of the oldest languages on earth. It lives in muscle before thought, in breath before voice. Fear is expressed through the flinch, the freeze, the flight, the pounding of the heart. Fear is information carried through nerves and blood. It announces itself through the body as plainly as weather.
We humans have always kept a list of animals we most fear.
The snake sits coiled at the top of that list.
In cognitive studies infants who have never seen a snake will startle at their shape. Neuroscience suggests that the human visual system is adept at detecting serpentine curves, a legacy of millions of years spent avoiding venomous bites.
Spiders come in a close second, followed by rats and mice.
And then there are the big predators we fear: wolves, lions, bears and sharks, with their forward-facing eyes and powerful jaws. These features print neatly onto the human brain’s threat-detection system.
And then there are the stories we tell about wild creatures, which sharpen our keen awareness of danger and unpredictability.
Statistically speaking, strikes, bites and attacks are rare, but fear does not speak the language of probability.
To understand why we fear these animals is to recognize how deeply human survival is braided with the lives of other beings on this planet.
I’ve been thinking a lot about fear lately because it is such a powerful emotion, informing our behaviors, relationships, opinions, politics and language.
And of course fear mongering is an effective tool for dividing us and instituting an Us and Them paradigm.
Our primal or biological fears include fear of death, fear of physical harm/violence, fear of the dark, heights, snakes, spiders, natural disasters, etc.
More abstract, existential fears can be even more powerful than biological ones: fear of the unknown, fear of isolation, fear of illness, fear of powerlessness.
Social fears can be as debilitating as well: fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of judgment, fear of emotional vulnerability, fear of intimacy, fear of public speaking, etc.
Modern cultural fears we deal with include fear of change, fear of the other, fear of authority, fear of AI, fear of environmental collapse, nuclear war, government, wildfire, etc.
Of course we are capable of creating fear by over-thinking and catastrophizing, which tilts our nervous systems into a state of terror.
Your body’s chemistry responds to an agitated mental state in exactly the same way it would if you were being chased by a mountain lion.
Fear doesn’t knock.
It won’t alert you
on your phone.
It enters through
the blood and the bone.
It will not bring
a bottle of wine.
It penetrates
and coils itself
at the base of the spine.
If you offer it dinner,
it moves in.
It has no manners,
no sense of time.
In wild animals, though, fear is extraordinarily precise. A deer freezes at the snap of a twig because the amygdala in her brain has learned the grammar of predators. A lizard holding perfectly still on a warm stone, a quail exploding from the brush, a whale diving deep at the echo of a sound— all are expressions of the same ancient circuitry.
What scientists call the “ecology of fear” describes how predators alters prey behavior even when no attack has occurred. Wolves returning to Yellowstone changed how elk grazed, riverbanks recovered and willows returned, even before any kills were made. In this way, fear is not merely an individual response, but a force structuring ecosystems.
Many animals rely on community alarm systems, calls, postures and chemical cues to warn others of danger. Prairie dogs use distinct vocalizations for different predators. Fish release distress signals that trigger coordinated flight in entire schools. In such cases, fear becomes a form of communal intelligence. Survival depends not just on speed, but on listening well.
Over time, animals refine their fear response. I notice the rabbits in our area never bolt when they see or hear me coming, but rather just take a few hops toward safer ground, continuing to recalculate odds as I grow nearer.
But here’s the most wonderful thing about animal fear: in the wild, animals know how to end it, how to shake it off, quite literally. When fear passes through a wild animal it doesn’t linger to build a monument.
After a near miss, birds fluff their feathers, shake their wings and resettle. Rabbits will freeze during danger, then shake their limbs when danger passes. After an escape, the doe fully trembles--her entire body shaking uncontrollably before lowering her head to graze. The horse shakes violently after a sudden noise has startled her, not out of weakness but out of wisdom.
In these animal rituals the body returns itself to equilibrium, releasing pent-up adrenaline and cortisol.The autonomic nervous system, having surged into sympathetic alarm, has recalibrated, finding its counterweight in parasympathetic calm.
Biologists call this ritual the completion of the stress cycle. Many mammals have different ways of doing this, thereby avoiding the chronic trauma-response so often seen in humans.
We humans also possess this ancient mechanism of releasing fear, though we resist it. We hold the tension from past traumas and near misses stubbornly in our shoulders, jaws, and in our backs. We swallow the shaking. We hold the electricity inside, where it slowly burns, producing hair-trigger responses to just about everything.
We doom scroll or read the news and find ourselves in a physical state of anxiety.
But fear can only leave the way it came, through the body, through sensation, through permission.
Wild animals remind us that fear is a wave passing through, not a permanent resident. For them, the trembling limbs, the shaking fur, the deep sudden exhale are powerful acts of renewal.
To release fear or agitation we must become in touch with our soft animal bodies. The muscles must empty themselves of the fear. The nerves must be released. Movement, jumping, shaking and intentional breathing is the way back to a calm state.
All of these things work together to console our overwrought nervous systems— and remind our over-reactive bodies that the danger, for now, has passed.
Wendy Videlock lives in Palisade. Her essays and poems appear in O Magazine, The New York Times, Hudson Review, Poetry Magazine and Best American Poetry. Her books are available wherever books are sold. She currently serves as poet laureate of the Western Slope. Find out more at https://wendy-videlock.constantcontactsites.com/.
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