“Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear.”

—George Addair

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🌿 Building a More Resilient San Antonio with The Impact Guild

Our friends at The Impact Guild are doing important work through their Climate Ready Neighborhoods initiative—connecting San Antonio neighbors, organizations, and community spaces to climate-resilience resources, trainings, and funding before, during, and after the storms of life. At the heart of the network are Neighborhood PODs (Points of Distribution): community-led spaces that strengthen local readiness and foster meaningful relationships among neighbors.

Interested in starting your own POD? Community groups and organizations can sign up to become a Neighborhood POD and gain access to tools, resources, workshops, and microgrant opportunities—including the SA Climate Ready Neighborhood Action Microgrant, which puts up to $1,000 directly in the hands of PODs ready to take action. A Field Guide is available in both English and Spanish to walk you through the process. Learn more and get started at theimpactguild.com/climate-ready.

On Fear and Hammocks

Amy Lynn Johnson, Communications Manager, Sunset Ridge Collective

I’ve loved hammocks for a long time. I got the first one for my backyard when at least a couple of my kids were still small enough to lay next to me and read books together in it. I loved laying in it and looking up at the clouds passing by in the blue sky overhead—or at the stars scattered above me at night. The feeling of weightlessness was an often welcome relief after a long day of running kids around, cooking, cleaning, bustling the kids off to bed after bathtime.

My original hammock was one of those cotton corded ones that eventually disintegrated from being outdoors (and from the gnawing of squirrels in spring). So I went without one for a while. Then in 2020 my mom went in cahoots with my kids to get me a new one for Mother’s Day.

*With my girls in our original backyard hammock.*

My oldest son, still a young teenager at the time, insisted on setting up the straps and hooking it into place between the two tree trunks. And then all of the kids insisted I immediately lay in it so they could enjoy the fruit of their labor as I rested blissfully in it. I remember looking at the hooks for a moment and wondering if they were hooked in the right way. My son insisted they were, and I got in—and immediately fell straight down from about three feet off the ground, hitting my tailbone and screaming bloody murder.

Thankfully other than a bruised tailbone, I was uninjured. My birthday was the following week and I took the kids to the beach, something fun we could still do while social distancing. The rushing waves sent a jarring jolt up my spine when I tried sitting at the water's edge. It took me years to feel safe getting into any sort of hammock again.

And it wasn’t for lack of trying. I pined for the carefree feeling of rocking beneath the sky. I even lowered the hammock so that my butt was essentially touching the ground when I got in it, trying for a sort of immersion therapy approach. But I still couldn’t get myself to lay back and relax. I eventually gave up and wrote it off as something that I used to love.

That is, until I met Sid. On a date a couple years ago, he took me to Camp Hot Wells for a soak in the hot springs. It’s an incredible place right along the San Antonio river and next to the Hot Wells ruins. After soaking up and relaxing, he encouraged me to get into a hammock they had. For some reason I did. And I felt completely safe and at peace doing so. He stood next to me and rocked me in it, and I could not believe that I was actually there, laying without an ounce of stress in my body in a hammock.

I had long gotten rid of the hammock I fell from, but I was completely unafraid of them after that. I was excited to tell my kids that I could miraculously enjoy hammocks again, and they rejoiced at the news with me.

On my 40th birthday the next month, I woke up to a new hammock and hammock stand on my back patio. My oldest daughter, 15 years old at the time, had ordered a new hammock and gotten up early that morning (on a school day!) to set it up and surprise me. It was one of the loveliest gifts I’ve ever received—and I still enjoy laying in it to this day.

There are a lot of fears we carry forward into our lives from the past. Our brains are programmed to remember things we found dangerous to keep us safe in the present. But sometimes we carry the muscle memory of fears that do us a disservice. Yes, my visceral fear of hammocks was there to keep me from experiencing that same pain (or worse) again, but it kept me from enjoying something I loved immensely for years.

As we get older that’s a risk many of us take in different ways. We make it through one scary adulting experience after another, and if we’re not careful it can lead to an atrophy of our joy-seeking abilities. It can be easy to live in a state of avoiding the things that scare us or bring us pain. But every once in a while, life brings in the right person to help break through those protective walls we’ve worked so hard to build around ourselves.

I’m grateful for having the fears I’ve held onto out of a sense of safety being challenged. I hope that you’ll listen to the invitations that show up in your life to step beyond fear and into a deeper sense of trust and safety. It feels so good when you get there. Especially when ‘there’ is as relaxing as a hammock.