The Sanctuary I Became

Notes from the Hollow Bone, Entry Four

Beneath my feet, the Earth drums.
Through my ribs, the sky hums.
I am neither the sound nor the silence—
I am the hollow where they meet.

What does it mean to be a sanctuary?

For a long time, I thought it was something I needed to build—a space to create, a refuge to design. I searched for rooms where I could be wholly myself, where judgment would not clip my wings, where collaboration could rise untrampled by competition. I searched for spaces where acceptance was not conditional, where belonging did not come at the cost of silencing parts of myself.

I could not find it.

So I began to carve it out. At first, by force. By need. By a silent desperation to survive the noise and scarcity of the world around me.

But over time, something softer emerged. I began to realize: the sanctuary was not a place. It was a becoming.

The sanctuary lives in my rootedness, like earth deep underfoot—steady, unseen, vital. It stretches above me too, wide and open like the endless blue sky, offering shelter not by walls but by boundless invitation.

It pulses not like a frantic heartbeat but like the low, rhythmic drum of ceremony—a vibration moving through my bones, each reverberation opening me wider, deeper, further beyond the borders of my own small self.

I became the sanctuary the moment I surrendered to the call that had been whispering to me all my life—the pull toward something vaster than knowledge, greater than achievement. A thirst not to possess wisdom, but to become it. To feel it move through me, not just to see it from a distance.

The awakening was not a single event. It was a long migration out of comfort, out of the known, out of the tidy rooms others built for me and I once willingly inhabited. It was the choice to step out into the wilderness of not knowing—to let the search be endless, and to find peace in the endlessness.

Now, I no longer seek sanctuary elsewhere.

I embody it.

Not perfectly. Not completely. But sincerely.

A hollow bone is not a structure. It is an offering. It does not hoard wisdom. It carries it. It does not create power. It conducts it.

This is the sanctuary I offer: rootedness without walls, expansiveness without conditions, and a drumbeat that reminds us—you belong, exactly as you are.

You have always belonged. 


With Grace & Ink,
Mai

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Barefoot in the Mystic

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Frank, the Bird, and the Burnt Map