Safe Word

I need a safe word, some set of syllables I can cry out when the bombing and shooting and screaming of children become too much; when the slaughter of the innocents spills over the top and drowns the world in tears; when the duplicity of the international political class threatens to commandeer all of the available oxygen. I’ve been toying with delphinium. It’s such a lovely word, so ancient-sounding. I imagine overgrown courtyards surrounded by stone pillars, possibly corinthian because that too is a pleasing and evocative sequence of sounds. I would just whisper delphinium or even think it in silence and the noise of the world would stop. The universe would understand that I’m needing a break. You too? Tall deep blue flowers would saturate my consciousness. In the Victorian era, delphiniums were said to communicate encouragement and joy. Encouragement and joy might be just the ticket right about now. Anything that centers me, that gathers all the ragged images together into a place of comfort and rest.

I understand that this is what meditation offers, what prayer has been known to do, but when I was a girl in New York I didn’t know anything about those practices my grandparents left behind in Eastern Europe. My family was urban and secular. I didn’t know anything about gardens either, my acquaintance with nature limited to pigeons, sparrows, and the weeds that poked their way through the sidewalk. I had probably never seen a delphinium. I was well-fed and well-dressed but my spiritual life was undernourished. Maybe delphinium is not the appropriate safe word for me. 

Photo by DAT VO on Unsplash

Where then was I transported out of the everyday? Where could I access the holy world, the healing world? One place of worship those many years ago was the Hayden Planetarium. All the anxieties and disturbances of my young life dissipated when the room went dark and the great dome filled with the twinkling of the constellations which you could hardly see in the real sky, overshadowed as they were by Manhattan light pollution. Less than a mile south of the Planetarium, the Central Park carousel was an occasion of  magic where children who grew up high above the city in apartment buildings could imagine riding horses across the steppe. We went merrily around and around in circles on painted ponies, searching for our mothers on the periphery, listening to tinny carnival music, ignorant of the world as children should be. Our bare knees and short legs wrapped themselves about the ponies for the length of the ride which was never long enough. We begged for another turn. We begged for peanuts and Cracker Jacks. We floated in the filtered light of New York in April or October, innocents abroad. We were adept at playacting childhood, even though even then, there were children on every continent who were not riding on carousels. In Algeria, in Indochina, in the American South and uptown under the El.

At seventy-eight, my heart is now overwhelmed by images of carnage. It’s as if the cruelty is flowing through the veins of the world and has nowhere else to go. Periodically in the course of the day, it leaks into my awareness.  If I focus on the mutilated bodies that I see behind my eyelids without even refreshing the images with the new ones arriving every moment, I despair. If I turn aside from the babies who will never play with their toes again, I feel alienated from my fellow humans. Who am I to watch Texas beat Arizona while Israelis and Palestinians are burying their dead? What does it mean to be human? I realize that the safe word carousel might have merit. It carries deep associations. It’s not only a ritual circle dance. It’s also an opportunity to visit childhood where we all once lived, every one of us, and which we were fortunate enough to survive. The anklets and white cotton underwear, the barrettes holding the pony tail in place. And from that low-to-the ground vantage point, I can feel the children in kibbutz Be’eri and the children in Gaza City running and hiding and screaming for their mothers who have already perished. I am small and they are small and we are defenseless and unblemished by politics. 

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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