Living a Wildflower Life! Finding Safety When It Feels Nowhere to Be Found

Photo: Wildflowers looking to the sun - alive - present - in unapologetic flowerness. Rocky Mountains, Montana (2023). Copyright SJPhotography.

Living a Wildflower Life! Finding Safety When It Feels Nowhere to Be Found

YOU ARE SAFE,
YOU ARE SAFE,
YOU ARE SAFE.

This is the sound
of the universe breathing.
Get quiet enough
and you will hear it, too.
It’s the only thing
we are ever being told.

_Elizabeth Gilbert, Elizabeth Gilbert for Em & Friends You Are Safe Journal

Safety is not always a place. Sometimes, it is a whisper – a fleeting moment of awareness carried on the breeze, warming your skin like sunlight breaking free from dozy parting clouds. Other times, it’s a trembling thread you weave into your own hands and being when the world feels jagged and sharp, when everything in you screams for shelter but none appears.

For those of us who have walked through the fires of trauma, safety is less a given and more a practice. It’s a feeling we chase, an elusive longing we dare not believe in. How could we trust it, when the people or places meant to hold us safe betrayed us? Safety, for many of us, became an abstract dream – a place we couldn’t find but desperately needed.

So how do we build it, this fragile, invisible thing? How do we steady ourselves when life feels overwhelming or cruel or lonely?