{"id":2997,"date":"2015-11-14T18:11:55","date_gmt":"2015-11-15T00:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=2997"},"modified":"2015-11-14T19:02:53","modified_gmt":"2015-11-15T01:02:53","slug":"empress-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=2997","title":{"rendered":"The Empress Part 2 + “safety”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_1839\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I finished packing for France. Nothing else to do but work on this Empress card. Still figuring out what to do in the background exactly. I’ve just been staring at it. <\/p>\n

In regard to yesterday’s Paris violence, I got a few people sending me really nice “be safe” emails, which I appreciate. On the other hand, it also gets me thinking again about the word “safe” which has been haunting me since my brother first started mentioning his disdain for the word in the context of being a professional mountain guide. <\/p>\n

I often think about the way this word is being foisted on us, and the nation-wide assumptions we make about the desire for safety. I realize I’ve posted about this before in a short thought piece. It comes up quite often for me in daily conversation: From various University student demands for “safe spaces”, to the way we treat our children, place expectations on Institutions, even the way we phrase ideas like “self-defense” in the martial arts world. Missing from all this Safe ideology is the reality that nowhere is actually safe. And that to succumb to the ideology of Safety is to actually give up your power to experience the triumph of risk-taking. I’m simply not interested in the idea of “safety” or “being safe” or “feeling safe”. <\/p>\n

For me the idea is that when I step outside my door, I could be killed. I could be yelled at, intimidated, or go through someone’s windshield on a bike. Someone could say some racist shit to me and punch me in the face. I could take Ayahuasca and go crazy. I could open my heart, fall in love and be annihilated. I could get into a weird sexual situation that I don’t want to be in. I could go climb a bridge and fall off by accident. All this stuff has happened to me at one time or another, with the exception of being killed. <\/p>\n

When I fell off the bridge, my brother and friend Sharif thought I had died. While I was falling, I thought I was going to die. When I went to the hospital, the doctor who sewed me up asked me if I had learned my lesson and would refrain from climbing bridges again. I never heard such a dumb thing come out of someone’s mouth in my life. <\/p>\n

Anyway when people say “stay safe” to me, I appreciate that they are expressing their care and desire for me to live to a nice old age. It’s just a nitpicky semantics thing really. Our current understanding of “safe” feels extremely misleading and disempowering. By demanding that institutions (government, schools, police, Hollywood, parents etc…) keep us safe, we remove a whole chunk of self-actualization from our brain activity. Weirdly the World hasn’t changed at all, but we (upper-middle class America) placed an illusion of safety over the view. Which is why people are always saying shit like “I can’t believe this could happen here” when unexpected violence occurs. What are you talking about? People are fucking crazy. Nature is fucking crazy. If I go walking in the mountains surrounding Los Angeles, I could get destroyed by a hungry ass mountain lion. That doesn’t stop me from hiking in the mountains. Anyway. See you in France, and thanks for the kind thoughts. I’m not being sarcastic. I genuinely appreciate the kind thoughts even if you’re using the words “stay safe”. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finished packing for France. Nothing else to do but work on this Empress card. Still figuring out what to do in the background exactly. I’ve just been staring at it. In regard to yesterday’s Paris violence, I got a few people sending me really nice “be safe” emails, which I appreciate. On the other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2997"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2997"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3004,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2997\/revisions\/3004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}