We were never in control. We never knew. We built a world fast and loud in all our supposed knowing. Mistaking our progress for power and control. Waiting for peace always just at the end of our ambitions. We didn’t know it was already here. Just paved over. The dirt-trodden path to our deepest wisdom was too slow beneath our hurried feet.

But then. An end. A beginning. We were exiled back into stillness, stripped of our defenses. The outside world got quiet, we quieted too. A silence we didn’t recognise. It was excruciating. We suffered. Resisted. The unknown. Loss. Anxiety and fear. Ever-ceasing power. We gripped it so tight in desperation that our clenched hands quivered and bled. We still couldn’t hold onto it. It slipped through our fingers and fell crashing back into the Earth. The sound it made was an alarm. We mistook it for an explosion.

In our forced surrender we started to notice. Things we hadn’t before thought or felt. What was dormant awakened.

Our growth felt like pain and our surrender felt like defeat. But the wound was actually a cure. The assault an intervention.

The force that came to destroy us had saved us.

The sound it made was an alarm.