How do you know you’re safe?

How do you know you’re safe…

In a time where there are no limits, no boundaries, no roadmaps?

How do you know you’re safe…

When the ground beneath you shakes at random and nations cry out for help?

How do you know you’re safe…

When economies are crumbling, people are raging, and our food is killing us?

How do you know you’re safe…

When in one split second everything can change?

How do you know you’re safe…

When your body fails you and your mind can’t distinguish real from fake?

How do you know you’re safe…

When all the world’s despair sits heavy on your shoulders like a soggy woolen coat?

How do you know you’re safe…

When security is nothing more than an illusion we assign to money, material goods, and other people?

How do you know you’re safe…

When truth is a matter of perspective?

How do you know you’re safe?

Your body tells you if you listen.

But first, you have to quiet it down, prepare it for stillness, give it a retreat from all your demands––go here! do that! buy this! sit down! eat more!––we are programmed to respond to ourselves in ways we can’t even comprehend. 

We see our feet walking, they’re so far away from us! Our hands too, and there’s no real control there. It’s like watching a movie that goes on and on and on. What’s this about again? It keeps changing!

How do you know you’re safe?

Find a spot. A spot of earth just big enough to contain your very small body. Then, sit down, even after all the hours you spend sitting inside your screened and isolated world. Sit down in a new way. Sit because you choose to. 

Notice what touches the ground first. Where are the creaks, the stiffness, the lightness? They don’t really matter but it’s interesting to observe. They’re going to be there anyway, and there will be many more eventually, so get used to it all. Don’t change it. It’s not changing for you and you don’t have that power anyway. 

Now, go in. Go into that space where everything is safe. Where your heart beats slowly and rhythmically, your blood flows without constriction, your body exists within your mind exists within your heart and maybe all that fits into your second last toe on your left foot, or the inside of your elbow. 

It doesn’t matter. 

There is a space in there that’s YOU and it’s what shows you that you are safe. 

Safe from your own mind and its destructive ways. 

Safe from the battles you wage upon yourself as a method to carry on the madness of social conditioning. 

Safe from the smoke and mirrors of other peoples’ intentions. 

Safe from failure, safe from gluttony, safe from greed, hatred, sorrow, and irritating flies that bother you while you’re trying to focus on work. 

Safe from self-interrogation and the judgements of earth and sky. They don’t care.  

Safe because you choose to acknowledge that insecurity is everywhere, unavoidable. You are completely vulnerable and at the mercy of every danger the world threatens to bestow upon you.

A mere human being. A human being of flesh and bone and blood. A conductor of electricity. Miraculous the day you’re born, mediocre until you die, when you become, again, miraculous for having been. 

Be miraculous now. Find out where safety falls off the map and then guide it back. 

Be big. Be small. Be ordinary. Be special. Be whatever comes to you when you’re in that place where everything is safe.

How do you know you’re safe?

You’re alive.