safe spaces

The day after I wrote that last post, I read this passage in Derrick Jensen’s Endgame. I know it’s not very imaginative just copying it wholesale, but it is so relevant I can’t not.

“All things need places where they are allowed to be who they are, places where they can – like the roots of chestnut trees – derive sustenance and strength from their surroundings. Terror and exploitation do not engender growth, and it is especially true that those normally subject to these need refuges where they can regenerate in peace.

I knew all of this as a child. Everyone does. Thus my relationship to the stars. Thus my relationship to the creatures in the irrigation ditch. Thus – and this may seem odd, but I’d wager this is true for many other thus violated – my relationship to places within my own body that remained safe, places my father could not touch.

It is possible to look back on one’s history, no matter how horrible, and find places of relative safety, where fear was never allowed to permeate. Those places can teach us, if we let them, that as well as knowing fear we can know – as I learned from the ditch, from the stars – safety, peace. We can know what it feels like to not have our guard up, to experience a world where the strong do not exploit the weak, where dogs do not eat dogs. This allows us not only to breathe, but to learn that openness feels different from defendedness, that relationships can be pleasing and beneficial. The key, then, to resilience, is to find or remember those places of refuge, and build out from there. Because I knew that peace exists, and because I experienced the difference between peace and abuse, I was able to migrate, slowly, toward openness, at first only toward the creatures in the ditch, and toward the stars, and then toward others equally nonthreatening, and then toward other people.

Perhaps even more important than providing me a template, those places provided me with the understanding that the pain I suffered was neither natural nor inevitable, that there are other ways to be. This understanding is crucial to resilience, and in fact to the continuation of life, because if all of life consisted of abuse and exploitation, what would be the use in going on?”

Safe spaces. This is a massive concept to me, especially so because I think it is one of the things I am good at, giving space to people where they can just be. And not just people. Non-humans need havens, from where they can build out. But there’s a key distinction to make here: the safe space from which one can build out and the safe space in which one hides.