Sanctuary. I’ve been thinking a lot about sanctuary. I asked my students what was sanctuary to them...the woods, reading, family, a girlfriend— the variety of answers fit the different needs of each personality.
What we had in common was the recognition of the importance of feeling safe, finding refuge from the clamor, the difficult, the hurt, that is sure to come our way. My sanctuary is my home. When I return home each day I find its peace, its comfort in the quiet, in the cleanliness. It’s a place where the world slows down and allows me to shelter.
I have also found refuge in returning to the places I have been in the photos I keep on my phone—back to the ice cream store in Dubrovnik where Tony and I smiled at our folly, in the front of a kayak with Tony, on the quiet running path away from the stress of graduate classes in summer. Any place where there is water.
“If you do not have a place of refuge, you must find one,” I try to convince my students, and when they find it, they will know why.
And writing. It too is a refuge.
What we had in common was the recognition of the importance of feeling safe, finding refuge from the clamor, the difficult, the hurt, that is sure to come our way. My sanctuary is my home. When I return home each day I find its peace, its comfort in the quiet, in the cleanliness. It’s a place where the world slows down and allows me to shelter.
I have also found refuge in returning to the places I have been in the photos I keep on my phone—back to the ice cream store in Dubrovnik where Tony and I smiled at our folly, in the front of a kayak with Tony, on the quiet running path away from the stress of graduate classes in summer. Any place where there is water.
“If you do not have a place of refuge, you must find one,” I try to convince my students, and when they find it, they will know why.
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