What makes you feel safe?

 Often it was the small, barely noticeable details, the sights and smells and sounds of existence, that carried me forth from day to day with lightness and gratitude while growing up on Agnes Avenue. I recall a brief time of sleeping in my parents' bed - it helped to quell the nightmares I had had since they'd first brought me home from St. Anthony's Infant Home. I would fall asleep in the wide bed, between my mother and father, and at some point early in the evening, my father would carry me back to my own room and gently tuck me in to my own bed. It became a cherished childhood ritual. I always pretended to remain asleep while my father carried me, because if I'd managed to fool him well enough, he seemed to cradle me with a deeper tenderness, taking his time, walking extra slowly, being extra quiet so as not to wake me. He would lay me in my bed with great care and gentleness, place the blanket over me softly, plant a small kiss my forehead, and tiptoe away. The care that he took with this near-nightly routine seemed to chase some of my nightmares away.

Later, when I became convinced that it was all right for me to fall asleep alone in my own bed, I found the sound of water rushing through the pipes in the house to be uniquely soothing. The bathroom with the big tub was just down the hall from my bedroom, and sometimes my father would take a late evening soak if he had had an extra long day at work. The whooshing sound that filled my room as the tub filled with water - I suppose it was a kind of white noise - sent me into a dreamy, happy state in which I knew no lasting harm would come to me. There was a sense of flowing with life, with the rush of the water, with the enveloping warmth that I knew was filling the tub. Perhaps it was another way of being carried. And perhaps it was my first taste of what I would later come to know as contemplation.

(Excerpted from a writing assignment I penned while reading Elizabeth Andrews' book "Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir")