By Niama Williams

     Fear has kept me from so many things, but I no longer let it keep me from love.

     How has this change happened? Because I never quit, and because love came looking for me when I least expected it. It is not a perfect love, but it has been a healing love, and because of it, I am willing to go after that one person I have loved for 11 years and ask him how he really feels.

     If you want all of the artistic backstory, check out "Niama Williams' Journal" on Tim Hooker's www.sushituesday.com. However, I want to describe for those of you brave enough to read this thread how it happened for me, how I became strong enough to reach for the love of my life and prepare myself for his answer.

     First, I made a friend. Well, no, first I was healed.

     You've read my bio and have heard about my desi--no, plan to move to South Shropshire? I visited there for a writing workshop in 2006. From the moment I stepped off the bus that Sunday and my feet hit Shropshire asphalt, something in me shifted. It was a powerful SPIRITUAL experience. My healing started and continued throughout the week with every step I took in Clun, Craven Arms. Something in my soul knew that I was at home, that I was in a space, a place that had been beloved by an ancestor, an ancestor thrilled that I was finally home.

     And with that healing came my self-acceptance. I accepted being 400 lbs. I accepted having a psychic gift and not being "crazy." I accepted all of who I was and began to accept who I'd been--a frightened and much abused child. A child whose sense of self, whose sense that she had a right to be in the world and be who and how she wanted to be had been driven underground, far underground.

     All of that baggage got left on the Shropshire hills that week of the writing workshop, and yes, it did happen as if by magic. I even met a man who desired me that week (check out www.blogtalkradio.com/drni the week of June 2nd) and he was movie star handsome.

     After this week of healing, and a tumultuous time of advanced healing once I returned to the States, my life became quite chaotic. Wounds were closing and cicatrixing so fast that I couldn't keep up! My life looked a shambles and then--worst come to worst--I lost my apartment because with a Ph.D., I couldn't seem to find work. I was overqualified for everything!

     One friend took me in, and then another, and then a friend did not like how this last friend was treating me and insisted that I move in with he and his mother. I did not understand why all of this had happened to me until I sat down one day and looked at all that my now current roommate was dealing with. Once I saw the struggles of his life, I realized that God had put me in his home to help HIM. That my troubles had all been precipitated to help this child of God put his own house in order.

     I started to give. Selflessly.

     I cleaned his kitchen. An apartment-sized kitchen. It took me six hours and one and a half bottles of Clorox Clean-Up. I got his mother out of his life; she was and had always been verbally abusive to him, and her rancor was eating him up mentally, physically, and emotionally. I cooked for him, grocery shopped for him, made taking care of him part of my life. Let him know that he deserved to be treated well and placed first.

     It's been nine months and he is a different person. He told me that he had been suicidal until I came into his home. That I had literally saved his life; that he had been looking for a way to kill himself that would not inconvenience too many people.

     All of the serving was not on my end, however. In nine months I have not opened a door for myself, car or otherwise; I have not emptied a trash can; I have not put on a coat alone; I have been assisted with the putting on of my shoes when I needed it; and my dishes are regularly picked up and taken into the kitchen despite my protests that he is working too hard. One day I was washing dishes and mentioned to him something that I wanted to do for the apartment, and he said, "I will have no problem with any decision you make."

     I almost dropped the plate I was washing.

     This man knows and practices unconditional love. He is 30 years my senior, but he has fathered me with such genuine love, caring and attention, so selflessly, that I have been healed even more than by the instantaneous contact with Shropshire dirt. The nine months of loving care have awakened my libido to a ferocious degree, but he is a minister and in love with another woman. Ours is an erotically charged friendship, however, and we have instituted a system of touch (upon waking, when one of us leaves the house or returns, before going to bed) that I knew as a child and which allows us to hug each other frequently without going crazy.

     At first I mistook his arousal for love, but he and I talk about everything, and soon we got it straight. It hurts a bit that he is not in love with me, but he is definitive about how he does love me and owes me his life. And his caring, his devoted attention has me strong enough to embrace going back out on my own after a dreadful two years of no employment and, even more importantly, I am taking steps to contact the man I have loved for eleven years and will be confronting him with the passion I have always known bubbled beneath the surface of our relationship.

     Love breeds love. My healing in South Shropshire led to my deep self-love, and my self-love made me brave enough to embrace the love of my friend, give to him selflessly, and now reach for what I know is the love of my life.

     Ground fear under your heels, girls. What Kwai Chang Caine said all of those years ago on Kung Fu is true (I am paraphrasing): "The fear grows and you think that if it dies, you will die. But no, only the fear will die." It's the episode about the blind girl going up the mountain. If you haven't seen it, go buy the DVD.

     The experience of love? Oh my goodness, girlfriends, it is worth it. It hurts a bit when he proclaims how much he does love me in the way that he does because it is not romantic love. Then I think of my plans for my true love, and I know that this friendship has healed me profoundly, and soon I will be enjoying the bliss that was my destiny and my birthright.

     Love and blessings,

     Dr. Ni