Insecurity

Alan Rayner
2 min readApr 4, 2020

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View from Anchorage’ (Oil painting on canvas, by Alan Rayner, 2001)

Who doesn’t know how it feels

To feel insecure

To crave certain anchorage

In reliable structure

To attach your self to

Only to find it ties you down

To groundless ground

And gives way as false foundation

Just when you thought your life depended on it?

What then becomes of your questing spirit

Does it sink into fathomless oblivion

Or buoy you up in wide soft space

Free-floating with relief

Far-seeing and foreseeing

In exhilarating current

What lay hidden beyond your safety specs

Before now?

Who doesn’t know how it feels

To feel singularly susceptible?

To crave security in numbers

Who consolidate your view

In concrete rules and regulations

Only to find they drag you back

To senseless paradox

And prove to be no more than flimsy fabrication

Just when you felt you most needed a safety net?

What then becomes of your yearning soul?

Does it drift into splendid isolation

Or find its feet in natural communion

The relief of belonging

With other seekers

Adventurously unknowing

What is to come at the end of your tunnel vision

After now?

.

Here is the true choice

We all have to make

When what we come to believe for safety’s sake is true

Proves false

And what we are led to believe by high security is false

Proves true

.

Will we fly free from what restrains us?

Will we crash on what drags us aground?

Discovering in the process

That what we feared as free fall

Allows us to move

And what we feared would break us

Is what makes us

Who and what and as we really are

Neither safe nor beyond recall

The intangible within the tangible

Love in life itself

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See also:- https://medium.com/@admrayner/the-cage-the-climbing-frame-and-the-swimming-pool-302818336c3e

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Alan Rayner
Alan Rayner

Written by Alan Rayner

Alan Rayner is an evolutionary ecologist, writer and artist, who is pioneering the philosophy of natural inclusion

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