A sense of safety

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Have you ever sought refuge?
Perhaps as a child in a scary situation, running to your parents or grandparents to hide from it in their company, or in their arms? Or when life has been so over the top busy that you went on a retreat, creating a moment of peace and calm into your life? Or even moving indoors when a turbulent thunder storm hits the area you live in, turning on all the lights so you won’t see the lightning?

I guess we are all in need of a place where we feel safe. A place we can hide out in when the world is just becoming a little bit too much to deal with ~ for whatever the reason. And for many of us that place is ‘home’. Whether ‘home’ is an area that we are familiar with, or literally the roof over our head and the walls it is resting on doesn’t really matter a whole lot in our every-day-lives.
When everything gets to be too much to handle, we hole up in our own space, and after cocooning for a couple of days, chances are we are looking at the world differently and are ready to face whatever lands on our (personal) paths.

There are times, though, when this solution is no longer available to us.
Usually when a force outside of ourselves ~ often even outside of our realm of influence ~ enters our lives, our space, our thoughts, and takes over every sense of ‘normalcy’ when had known in our lives up to that point.

Recent history divides those forces up into two categories:

• Natural disasters like tsunamis, hurricanes, active volcanos etc.
• War.

Either way it can take over our lives and uproot us. Presenting us with a very real danger. Putting us in a situation where self-preservation makes us move away from all the things we had taken for granted; away from all the things we know and love in order to survive. In order for our children to survive.

It prompts us to move to any place that we can find that will provide us with a sense of safety. A sense that even if we fall asleep, we will survive the night…

The sad yet interesting thing is that this sense of safety is much more readily provided for those fleeing any natural disaster, than it is to those fleeing a war-torn environment. We seem much more tolerant to those seeking refuge from nature, than to those seeking refuge from war.

And yet, at one time or another each and every one of us has sought refuge ~ needing a space that gave us a sense of safety…
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