If you feel grief, let it rock. Let it rock.

~ Martin Prechtel

This site was named No Safe Distance for a reason. None of the work I have done has felt particularly safe to me. It's terrifying to go head to head with fundamental existential questions. It's sobering to have someone you love ask you to help bear their fate. It's hard to look at the reality that sometimes in life, you simply run out of "do overs." 

I have faced, and continue to face, all these things.  

As a result, you won't find me spouting a lot of sugar-coated platitudes here. As a friend said once, "I'm no longer a grief virgin."

But don't come here looking for a morose woman.

I'm far from being a mope. More paradox for you. I work very, very hard and that is just what helps me live lighltly. What I will share with you is what WORKS for me. Not what sounds good and makes me feel like everything is going to be okay.

Not everything in my life is going to be okay. I know that.

This stuff works because it allows me to love life and stay fully engaged even though some of it absolutely breaks my heart. It's "go time" for me.  I can't afford to be sitting in a leaky boat at this point in my life, and I don't know that you can either. 

What I have learned for myself, and No Safe Distance will be the forum for me to share much of this with you, is that the best way out of something is often to go through it. 

The good news is that if you are up to the task, as I have tried to be, you will find yourself in excellent company with many footsteps lining the path ahead of you. Poets, writers, philosophers, saints and even a sinner or two have left words of wisdom, like luminaria along the path.  It may be that you haven't noticed them before because you have found yourself on a path you were looking for, but trust me, they are there and part of the work of this site is to shine a light on them for you so you won't feel quite so disoriented and alone on your journey.

And I'll be humbly submitting my own words and works alongside as I, too, make my journey to the grave.

Joy and sorrow are inseparable.
Together they come
and when one sits
alone with you
remember that the
other is asleep upon your bed.

~Kahlil Gibran