There is an instinct that washes over me whenever something horrible or disappointing happens.
I feel the urge to run to a place set apart from the rest of the world, a place where I can be warmed, curled up to meet my core and surrounded by that which brings me back to my own in breath and out breath. Back to the sound of breathing and the sensation of being surrounded, and nothing else.
Perhaps you have this instinct too. I think we all do. Maybe it begins in the womb, this basic understanding of a need to dwell in a place, set apart from the mad and random world just outside the boundaries of flesh.
It's our first experience, really. To be held. Hopefully all of us get to have that feeling of being held reinforced, as I did while I grew.
I can still hear my mother's voice against the backdrop of my own tears: "you come here," often reaching for me to come to her breast, to be surrounded by the sanctuary of her arms.
Or, my grandmother Fernie: "come over here, right now" with shoulders forming a base where I would be pulled inward and on to a rocking chair where I often found solace inside arms that held back the world.
I had that. And, because I had that, my children have it too.
Last week was an awful, awful week in our country. Hours before blind rage turned to gunfire and screams in Dallas, I sat in my home office watching on social media two men breathe for the last time.
I watched Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, struggling and pinned to the ground as lethal bullets drove explosive fire power in to his body.
I watched the force of trauma flood out of Alton's son Cameron on live television when his best efforts to be brave broke like a dam, giving way to tears and wailing.
I watched the stain of blood wash over a white t-shirt as the life of Philando Castile in Minnesota drained away... a child heard crying off camera as Castile's girlfriend, Diamond called the man who fired the bullet "sir" before praying to Jesus in the middle of the street.
I heard that Minnesota officer's voice break like a child's voice after something horrible happens.
Hours later, in a newsroom it was my assignment to pull the latest video from CNN and NBC and get it on the air as quickly as possible while bullets flew in Dallas.
I did the best I could, as fast as I could. But suddenly, it all just became too much.
I left my computer and the TV monitors, ran up a staircase, around a series of corners and down a hall to find a men's room where I entered, shut the door, cut off the lights and sunk down to the floor to just breathe.
It saved me.
And, it was a moment I have replicated many times over and over in the days since the co-created experiences in our nation have joined together to remind us the work of healing and hearing each other is not only imperative if we are to survive, but also far from over.
I don't have the right combination of answers. I don't think right now anyone does.
But I know where to find them. The answers are inside the quiet places that exist in the hearts of every woman and man alive. And to access these answers, we need sanctuary.
We need places set apart from every day life and the chaos it sentences us to.
We need places where sanity can take root, where the seeds of compassion and understanding and forgiveness can grow.
Lao Tzu's brilliant teachings about achieving peace in the world directs us that peace in the world begins with peace in our nations, and that peace in our nations cannot happen unless there is peace in our cities born of peace between neighbors, born of peace in our homes, born of peace in our hearts.
Seeking this peace and sanity during 44 years of life, I have walked the paths of a missionary, a teacher and a priest. Trauma and grief for a time made me an agnostic turned atheist. Tears breaking like a dam in a yoga studio carried me to find sanctuary in meditation. Meditation brought me back to a sense of the sacred divine within each of us, and the call to compassion.
And I got there in my own life, because I found sanctuary in a place set apart from everything else.
We cannot find community without first experiencing the communion of quiet moments, the intimacy of self, there on the edge of the inward universe.
Before I decide what to do in response to this dark hour in our nation's history, I'm going to first decide to go home to my in breath and my out breath and dwell in the quiet that will undoubtedly tell me what to do with the days that demand my participation.
Where do you find sanctuary? Where can you turn for peace? Where is your solace, when other sources cease to make you whole?
It's my hope this week, if you don't have a place to turn for peace, that you will create one and go there.
Go there, like a child needing a mother's arms. In time, if enough of us do that, we will know what to do next to save us from so many tears.