held harmless

If anyone or anyplace needs indemnification, it's Planet Harm. To indemnify: compensate for a hurt or injury; or to protect one against hurt or harm. From Latin, indemnis, unhurt. Here it gets tricky for us Harmlings. Who among us can be counted among the unhurt? Exactly. No one. That doesn't mean we're on a level playing field of harm. No, no, no. Harm glides on a continuum starting from the first infinitesimal, granular speck away from unhurt or unharm all the way to the end of the harm continuum: a nightmare beyond words or imagination. Worse than that, is there an endpoint to the harm continuum? Harmlings can always go darker, conjuring up new brews of bruises and agonies. 

Then again, surely it's not linear. Our paths of harm are zigs and zags, spins and turns, halts and balks. Same with unharm.

Let's not be so bleak. If we are to think that way about the worst of us, or the worst of the inclinations of any of us, then we should go to the other end of the spectrum. When does harmless leach into harm? In other words, who says anything or anyone is pure unhurt/unharm or pure hurt/harm? And whoever said it's static or immutable?

In real life on Planet Harm, it's typically, if not always, more gray. Harm competes and blends with unharm. Unharm flirts with harm; they may have a dalliance here or there. Unhurt and hurt, harmless and harm, might sport in the same bed in some riotous rampage of intertwining. They may even breed offspring. Or it might be more subtle than that: harmless and harm might merely exchange glances, or shake hands, or briefly embrace, or catch a cold from each other, a virus of harmlessness infecting harmfulness, or vice versa.

This is getting too confusing. The point is: it ain't all black or white.

We'll end on a buoyant note, a lifting of spirits, a poetic hymn to what Harmlings aspire to, sometime somehow somewhere:

Held harmless.

In the bosom of love. In a mother's arms. A father's grip. Embraced in the night. Sheltered from the storm. Under the brooding wing. Behind the fortress walls. Held harmless. Held without question or qualification. Held without cost or payment. Beyond all doubt, merit, or fear. Less harm. Free of harm. Banished. Forgotten harm. Erased. Ambrosia d'amnesia.