I Don't Want to Be 'Safe'. I Want to Be Whole.

thoughts on 42 trips around the sun

Welcome to Slow Folk - a community for gentle hearts and rebellious creatives, thirsty for a slower life in a world obsessed with speed.

Welcome to the Unbusy Revolution.

Today is my birthday.

Like most mornings, I’m up before the sun, curled up at my keyboard at my desk by the dark window.

I pull an espresso and three tarot: The Tower inverted, VIII of Pentacles and IX of Cups. I’m not interested in reading my future; Tarot has become a powerful tool to tap into my own intuition. Today is no different.

This past year I’ve felt a shifting, an emerging, a coming home. Like my old farm dog shaking off snow after a winter sleep in the pasture, something has awakened anew.

I cannot put my finger on it, cannot name it, do not wish to.

I can feel it, and that’s enough.

Every birthday, I set an intention for the year ahead.

Not a resolution to be broken. A red string tied to my finger whispering - Remember.

Last year I decided it was time to show up as myself, for myself.

The past decade-plus has been dedicated to the service of others. Mothering children, keeping the home, building our farm, being a wife.

With age comes wisdom (often in the guise of giving less f*cks) and mine told me I’d been waiting for someone else’s permission to start living my life for me . . . That permission slip was never gonna come.

So I wrote it myself.

The result has been a year of making time for writing, taking piano lessons for the first time, learning how to front crawl, opening my brick-and-mortar shop, swimming and lifting weights nearly every day, finally launching the Slow Folk Co. and going to more live concerts in a year than I have in the past decade combined.

It has meant leaving playing safe behind. And as I move into my 42nd year, I have realized, in that place deep in my belling where my knowing resides, that -

I don’t want to be safe.

I looked around one day and realized - safety, in our culture, has become the pinnacle aspiration of our lives.

Emotional safety. Safety from ideas we don’t share. Safe from germs and disappointment in equal measure. From heartbreak. From fear. From judgement. From words.

In doing so, we inscribe smaller and smaller circles around ourselves, reducing the scope of both ourselves and our world, and we tell ourselves a story about our very nature that is fundamentally untrue.

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We are not fragile beings. We are strong and resilient and designed to bend in the wind.

Each year, in late winter, every flat surface of my tiny farmhouse is covered with heirloom tomato seedlings by the hundreds.

Tomatoes are one of my life’s greatest passions. I collect rare, impossibly delicious varieties like some of my friends collect shoes.

Every morning, with coffee in one hand, I walk through the house and say good morning by running my fingers through the forest of stems.

I bend them. Stress them. Create delicate fractures in their flesh.

This stress is what they require to thrive.

Without the wind to bend them, my hand must do the work, must intentionally remove them from their safe space into one in which they can grow strong and resilient.

Without that stress, they will grow tall - too tall, too fast. It will be an illusion of greatness.

Their bodies will be too thin and too delicate to hold their leaves to the sun, never mind the heavy fruit to come.

If you are irritated by every rub, how will you ever be polished? - Rumi

I’m not interested in growing tall like a coddled tomato, wobbly and weak under the weight of too much safety.

I want to cultivate the strength to stand on my own two feet, stretch my arms to the sun and carry the gifts I’ve been given.

This year, I’m challenging myself to tease out the nuance between throwing caution to the wind blithely - and mindfully, intentionally saying No Thanks to the Cult of Safety.

To be curious about the parts of myself that not only would survive a little stress, but which require them to thrive.

Learning happens just beyond the edge of comfort; so does growth.

I want to model for my kids an alternative to the safety culture that’s all around them. To trust the miraculous processes that exist inside them, the ones that allow both bone to fortify under impact and muscles to strengthen when torn.

That their life in the dirt and literal shit of farm life are the reason they have thriving, robust immune systems.

That the painful parts of life, whether the loss of a beloved dog or my own mother, are what bring purpose, grace and meaning to the whole.

In order to build ourselves up, we must will willing to literally tear parts of ourselves to pieces.

For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction. ―Cynthia Occelli

I think about this quote a lot.

My life on the farm has taught me that many of the things we’re afraid to look in the eye - death, suffering, experiences that make us feel unsafe, grief that breaks us open . . .

These things are the key to a full, beautiful, wholehearted life.

Our denial and avoidance of them doesn’t make them go away. It simply makes the pain worse when they come.

Worse yet, it causes millions of souls to spend their lives curled up taught in the tiny husk of their life - never exploding with exuberant life, full-throated joy and - yes, pain - into the life that is waiting for them.

So NO. I don’t want to be safe. I want to be whole.

Discomfort, pain, heartbreak, death, suffering, grief, fear . . . These are all the price of admission to a full and wholehearted life.

This explosion from our seed into our greatest expression isn’t something that happens once and is done.

Just like the seasons, it is a process that must happen over and over again, always and never the same.

Every time we learn something new, grow a little more, shed our old skin, stretch our luxurious, miraculous, tender, resilient bodies out into the life that is waiting for us.

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Stacey Langford is a writer, renegade farmer and slow business mentor living and working in Canada’s Fraser Valley. In 2010 Stacey ditched her cubicle in the city to turn her attention homeward, farm and help others craft a simple life, from scratch.

Are you ready to build a life - and a living - you actually love?

I help rebellious solopreneurs and creatives build businesses rooted in Slow Values. If you’re ready to step into your own Slow Life and finally claim your calling, let’s chat!

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