The Dangerous World of Safe Spaces.

I’m eight. Everything was going pretty well in my life. Then there was that day when my mom screamed she wasn’t…my mom.

Then nothing felt safe again.

In my pink bedroom, shaking behind a white wing tip chair, gripping a stuffed turquiose dog called Pierre, I think I vowed then that I was on my own. My life after that seems to have been a series of reactions to that moment. I spent the next three decades searching for the “safe space” I lost that day in my pink bedroom at 155 S. Orange Drive. After what I’m about to tell you, know this: that cushy pink room still holds the record for the most dangerous space in my life.

I carried on, trying to comfort myself for many decades by seeking people, places or things where I would feel safe, where I could feel home. I looked everywhere— in other surrogate mother figures, in men, in the ocean, in the library, in temples and shrines, in the mountains, in yoga class, in a cult, in recovery meetings, in bars where everyone knows your name…

It was a downward spiral of safe-seeking.

“He’s my sanctuary.…she understands…that woman is the mother I never had…the Master is coming to…