Safe Houses: Offering Sanctuary (with Audio)
Plus TWO ANNOUNCEMENTS
Dear Friends,
Blessings to you in these Spring days. Here in Santa Cruz we are surrounded by an uprush of color, blossom, light and fragrance. Though I imagine I am not alone in saying it can be hard to take in all this natural beauty, given the daily and urgent authoritarian outrages of our government on levels too numerous to list.
Given the extremity of this moment, I was recently reminded by my friend and teacher Deena Metzger of my essay “Safe Houses,” about the importance of offering sanctuary and community to each other. She used the essay as part of her teaching recently, and I offer it below with a new Afterword, and including an Audio version.
Before I share the essay, I want to let you know about offerings from the amazing Laura Davis, my friend and colleague, and a member of our writing community. Laura’s life’s work has been to provide sanctuary and safe harbor to others. One of her programs this year, “The Healing Heart of Bali: A Writer’s Journey of Renewal for Body, Mind, and Spirit,” August 10 - 25, 2025, will be a deeply healing retreat for this current moment. There are now just three spots left. I also wanted you to know that Laura has joined Substack, and is sending out weekly posts to help build resilience, courage and joy in this chaotic time.
I also wanted to highlight the work of the Santa Cruz Welcoming Network, dedicated to supporting asylum seekers and other refugees in my town. They offer assistance with food, legal aid, employment, LGBTQ+ and housing. If anyone in Santa Cruz County has the capacity to offer space, a room, a parking space for a RV, or can rent at below market, please contact the Santa Cruz Welcoming Network here. And in any case, do check out this extraordinary organization.
Blessings and sanctuary to all.
Carolyn
Safe Houses: Offering Sanctuary
With a new Afterword
Safe houses have a long and venerable past as places for survivors of domestic violence, people escaping enslavement during the Underground Railroad, Jews during the Holocaust, and for refugees of all kinds throughout history. Now we face something we have never faced before—environmental planetary breakdown—and all humans are in need of a safe house. We all need a collective place to speak and be witnessed, to be offered understanding, healing, shelter, deep conversation and connection.
And all over the world, safe houses have arisen to meet that need.
They are in cities, towns, villages, on mountains, and near rivers. They are in small townhouses and large lodges, modest apartments with soft rugs and sacred paintings, or condos with swimming pools and hot tubs. They are in log cabins in the woods, rustic cottages on the beach, apartments in urban skyscrapers. They are modern-day safe houses, and they can be found in suburbs, cities, farmlands, countrysides, deserts and forests everywhere on the planet.
Together, they form an interlinking pathway—a system of safe houses offering sanctuary, meaning, hope and healing. Each place exists within the Earth’s spirit. Each offers space for our love and grief, for truth-telling, and for the sacred to unfold. Each honors the privilege of being one among many on our planet of rivers, mountains, deserts, and endlessly diverse animals and creatures. Each carries our individual and collective stories. Lives are mended there, and hearts given peace.
Safe houses welcome all religious traditions and require none, and honor all forms of creativity and healing. Here, women with kind eyes and strong hearts midwife souls. Men of wise being and strong spirit gather others in sacred community. When we visit these places, we feel we have re-entered the web of existence. We have mended our part of the whole.
This interlinking pathway has woven itself into a worldwide wisdom body, though each part has no full knowledge of the whole. This is the essence of its brilliance, and its generative wealth. There is no village without one, though these places are often not apparent. Safe houses have few signs, are generally not churches or temples, print few brochures, do not proselytize. Yet people find their way to these houses. We learn of them through word of mouth, friends, colleagues, community events, farmer’s markets, social media and the internet, and every other way humans spread the word. We will continue to find them, and to gather.
Informal gathering places for healing, restoration, teaching and political action have always existed, and historically have played a vital role in times of deep change. When economic and political systems collapse, personal connections and private gatherings continue—often underneath or despite or in place of established institutions.
I am thinking here of Ireland, and the ways in which my Irish ancestors, over centuries of colonization, famine and poverty, used their domestic spaces to pass on their language, history and culture in cottages, hedge schools, fields and barns. There they offered learning for the mind and, equally important, sustenance for heart and soul. These spaces are a primary reason the Irish culture is so vibrant and alive today.
There is one safe house where for decades I have been taught and healed. Inevitably I arrive in need of clarity, in the swirl of daily work and activity; here the sacred reasserts itself and I am quieted and opened. At this safe house lives a medicine woman of wise mind and heart who midwives souls. After my time with her community, I stand more whole, once again able to love the world in all its gleaming beauty and tattered need.
Then I return to my home on an ordinary street with lovely neighbors and a hidden creek, and I become the woman with the kind eyes and wild heart who welcomes others. Over twenty years, the community of hundreds who have written with me and listened to each other’s work in my writing groups has become a lifeline to renewed meaning and hope.
I see many kinds of formal and informal spaces of sanctuary all around me, held by healers, activists, teachers, writers, artists, ritual leaders and others who gather in circles devoted to art, writing, yoga, political action, prayer, study, singing, and more. They provide vital space to come together, to express ourselves, to grieve the state of the earth, take tangible action, and become enlivened again.
There are many safe houses in the town where I live, and likely in the town where you live too. This is our true wealth: countless safe houses, truly millions, an invisible web that encases the entire world. Most of the others I will never know. But we all exist within the web of safe houses, woven within the spirit of the Earth.
Some of you may recognize yourselves. Perhaps there is a safe house where you go for healing, connection, meaning, conversation, creativity. Perhaps you have your own safe house or are on your way to creating one. You are a part of this web. Your safe house does not have to write a grant, establish a foundation, build a building or launch a website, though some may do any or all of these things. It simply needs to offer deep listening and safe harbor to people of all ethnicities, genders, and life experiences. Together, those of us who are part of this web carry this sanctuary wherever we go. We offer it where we are. As writer and healer Deena Metzger once wrote: Be and provide sanctuary.
During our time of planetary and institutional breakdown, this worldwide network of independently arising safe houses forms an underground web, a foundation from which we can build a future. The overpowering global structures hurtling us towards possible extinction can make us feel powerless. Offering a safe house, or participating in one, is active work that makes restoration possible. If you feel the call, find a safe house near you. Follow what you love: art, books, political action, meditation, or a thousand other reasons that people gather. Find a circle that offers true sanctuary for your heart and mind, and acknowledges the need for restoration for all beings and the Earth. And if you don’t find one, gather with one or two friends, and begin it yourself.
The network of safe houses will continue when modern economies or institutions can no longer sustain themselves. In our time of collapse and upheaval, humans everywhere are teaching ourselves how to live without the larger culture, for we have been and are creating our own. We have learned how to heal, how to tell the stories, how to hold and honor grief, how to carry beauty, how to love the Earth.
In our individual safe houses, as we each go about our work, we are being spun by the Earth herself into a shimmering web, gossamer, light, fragile yet tenacious. Each of us is a fine thread of the web. And like any web, when one part is lost or destroyed, we endlessly go about rebuilding and reweaving. From this immeasurable, self-replicating wealth we can begin anew, in concert with all beings and with the guidance of the Earth herself.
When you walk into a safe house, you are warmly greeted. You feel you are part of the whole. Yes, this is the place, someone smiles at the door. Welcome.
New Afterword, April 21, 2025
I wrote this essay seventeen years ago at a place that has profoundly impacted my life and which inspired the essay itself—Deena Metzger’s home and land in Topanga Canyon, California. This past January, that vibrant place was seriously threatened by the Pacific Palisades and Eaton wildfires. When I heard about the fires and confirmed that Deena was safely evacuated, I texted her to say we were sending love and safety to her, and also, if there was ever a need, she was welcome to come north to Santa Cruz to stay with Jean and me.
Weeks later, after she was finally home, Deena called to touch in. She has been evacuated several times a year for the last ten years due to nearby wildfires. She told me that it had been frightening and extremely close this time—and our offer of sanctuary had truly mattered. It made her think, she said, of the essay I wrote years ago about safe houses. We were speaking just after the inauguration on January 20th, and she noted how sanctuary and safe houses had now taken on essential meanings and implications. The memory of the essay, like my offer, had comforted her.
I thought of how life moves in spirals, and the ways we are brought to revisit things in a new way, as a new person, and from a new time in history.
Since 2007 when the essay was written, the unfolding environmental breakdown that we could all see coming has now begun. As the LA wildfires in January made abundantly clear, we are living with cataclysmic wildfires all over the world. We are encountering massive flooding, hurricanes that defy our current categories, unlivable heat, rising seas, and much more. This is not news, and it’s not new; yet again in 2024 the earth broke all previous heat records, the last of which was set in 2023. We are alarmingly numb to the headline; we’re preoccupied—and not unreasonably—with unconscionable events in the human world.
As we find ourselves in a time of widening emergency on countless levels, the question is of course how to keep one’s self and one’s family safe, and also how to help one’s community, how to offer sanctuary and refuge to those in need. And in 2025, it is clear that the ways to offer refuge are wide and deep. A safe house is a place, and it is also an offering, an action, something we carry in our hearts.
In truth, all that we do can offer sanctuary. A moment of genuine presence with a neighbor or a stranger at a cafe, a decision to show up and listen to someone in distress, taking in someone in need of safety or a bed, protecting immigrants, trans people and all who are targeted, standing with those who have been illegally deported and the many others who are now in danger, gathering with friends and community for a meal, a protest, a movement, a conversation, a song, a poem. Listening deeply, to all beings of the planet. In these and thousands of other ways both large and small, it is possible to carry a safe house within.
As in the past, all over over the world today there is an interlocking web of people who offer sanctuary to others. Perhaps our deepest definition is that we honor all life, all species, all types of people, all parts of the Earth. We are everywhere, and we know this. It matters in every way—both individual acts of offering refuge as well as collective political acts—that we exist and are part of the earth’s web of widening sanctuary.
In the U.S. and worldwide, right wing authoritarian forces are amassing political power, stealing lands, enacting genocide, fomenting war, dispensing with due process, conducting unlawful deportations, overpowering institutions and displacing entire peoples. But instead of being helpless, there is this constant and unassailable truth. Our everyday offers of sanctuary are utterly necessary, history-changing, and healing to all involved. Things tend to gather on their own, and spark unexpectedly. Every real change begins from individual actions, from the bottom up, often in unplanned, organic ways.
It is also clear that our species in our current modern form is unable to reverse the climate crisis we have caused. As global emissions only increase, any one of us could and will easily find ourselves in need of temporary or permanent refuge in the coming time, as floods, storms, and wildfires become more regular. Offering sanctuary, as well as receiving it, knowing that we are all holding each other up, that all of this is reciprocal, is part of mending our hearts as well as our world.
May the alarm in our bellies and the fire in our world shock us, open us, into something entirely fresh and not yet imagined. May the beauty of our world—the tree by our door, a blossom, a quivering hummingbird, a wildflower, a kindly human, a sparkling child—inspire us to remain allied with life, to remember that history runs in spirals, and the future story is still unwritten.
Perhaps something new will fly out into the cosmos, a new spark to ignite and combine with something entirely indigenous to our species, found in our ancient DNA, something that knows how to survive, how to imagine new worlds and build new civilizations. We humans have done it before. Many times.
We can lean back into the enormous spirit and creativity of our ancestors, and forward into the potent possibilities alive in this moment, to make a livable, interconnected, mutually reinforcing world with sanctuary for all beings, with all of us, together. This is not some utopian dream or impossible wish. It is, in all obvious and logical truth, the only path to survival.
Though there are many collective forces hurtling us towards self destruction, in my bones I believe that our species wants to survive. We know, somewhere in our essence and DNA, that our survival and the health of our earth and our animal kin are entwined.
We will make our way together. We can find ways to build something new, a different future, together. We can begin to think and write new thoughts, to live in new ways, to listen more deeply, to truly be and provide sanctuary for each other and all of our plant and animal kin.
When you meet someone who is part of the interlocking web of safe houses and sanctuary, who is aligned with life and the larger pulse of the planet, you are warmly greeted. You feel you are part of the whole.
“Yes, this is the place,” someone smiles. “Welcome.”
There are many essential resources in this time. Here are two of them:
Deena Metzger’s essay on offering refuge “Sanctuary in a Time of Dread,” February 4, 2025.
Rebecca Solnit’s essay on the unexpected movements of history, “When Hope and History Rhyme,” April 18, 2025.
Photographs by Carolyn Brigit Flynn.
I’ve had the great privilege and pleasure of being Carolyn's student for well over ten years now. When I walk into her house once a month for five hours on a Friday, I know I am entering sacred time and space and joining sacred community. I am certain that whatever is deepest in my heart, whatever is unexpressed and sometimes even unknown within me, will be expressed in the profound love, acceptance and safety in that room. I know I will write something deep, true, down to the bone. I will get to “the story under the story,” and travel far beneath the surface of my daily life into the real truth, the forbidden, the shadow, the essential.
As a writer and teacher myself, who provides this kind of sanctuary for others, I need a safe place to mine my own depths, to chart the deeper currents. Carolyn provides that space for me, and I am so grateful to her and to the incredible community of women writers she gathers.
The pieces I’ve written in Carolyn’s class frequently provide the seeds for pieces I develop later, including many essays I’ve published here on Substack. During the ten years it took me to write my memoir, The Burning Light of Two Stars, Carolyn’s safe creative harbor played a key role in my discoveries and in reconciling the struggles it took to bring that story to fruition. She gave me a North Star to guide my journey.
I love this essay Carolyn wrote about sanctuary and safe houses—the very space she provides. These are the kinds of special places we need to heal us, to connect us, to sustain us, and to enable us to survive in dark and dangerous times.
I’m on Carolyn’s email list so I received this essay a few days ago and loved reading it then, but hearing her read it here in her own voice, made it even more powerful and precious to me.