I wandered into a new age shop in Little Five Points. As I examined cool polished stones with miraculous powers to heal and stimulate creative powers, I overheard a conversation behind me. A young female voice explained how each person must choose either either love or fear. I’d heard this idea before, and there seems to be truth in it. But I wondered if love and fear are really separable like that. Can an “or” be set between them, so that we can take one and leave the other? It seems to me that in the realm of lived reality love and fear come together, and that only imagined abstractions can be loved purely or feared purely.