Days 30-32 - Your Hiding Place

Maybe you go there because you can hold your tears no longer. In your hidden space, you can release some of your grief away from judging eyes.

   Perhaps, you travel there because, guarded by the trees, you can dance your happiest imaginings. 

   No mean winds can burn Love's skin.  Your hiding place is holy, sacred, and comforting.

   Amid the silence, you can heal amid God's Love. 

   You are protected.

   Six centuries ago, Kabir wrote:

   "Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens." (translated by Robert Bly)

   To what secret garden do you retreat when the world (or your anxieties) overwhelm?

    Martin Scorsese has created for us the Academy Award nominated movie-version of the book, Hugo. In the 19th century setting a young boy watches his world through the hidden eye of a giant clock.

   Scorsese recounts how he grew up confined to his Manhattan apartment home by asthma. Day after day, he watched through the eye of a third floor window and dreamed of the movies.

   Scorsese's artistry awakens our individual point of view. We find, there, our own story.

   In Woody Allen's film, The Purple Rose of Cairo, the protagonist (Mia Farrow) escapes her abusive husband by sneaking into the darkened movie house down the street. Her obsession with film becomes so great that one afternoon the characters leave the screen and join her. Her life is suddenly populated not by a mean husband and jostling strangers but by her own cabal of charming actors. 

   My hiding place as a child rested between back-facing neighbor's garages. It was too narrow for adults.

   Only I knew this place. Only I could squeeze in, lean back, and stare at the soaring branches of a eucalyptus.

   Some afternoons, the leaves would wave to me as they caught a Pacific breeze on its journey from the California coast to the foothills of the High Sierras. Some evenings, the branches leaned silent against the darkening air. 

   My childhood home has been demolished and replaced by a shiny new box of a house. Only the eucalyptus remains.

   From my twenty-first century hiding place, I can see it still. 

-Erie Chapman   

Photo - Tia - 2011 - copyright erie chapman 2012

Comments

[Maria Doglio]

I'd climb to the top of my favorite tree that sat along a little stone wall separating fields; there I could sway with the tree when it was breezy, or sit with a book when it was calm (usually Alice in Wonderland, which I was obsessed with). Or I would just sit with myself daydreaming, or watching the woods at the far end, hoping to catch a glimps of DJ, our neighbor's big black horse that spent his days there. Sometimes I would climb to a lower branch that was perfect for hanging upside down on and doing some gymnastics--I'd pretend I was part of a circus.

Thanks for bringing back that memory, Erie. Now I am "this age", I realize how far removed I am from climbing trees, replaced by fear of breaking a bone! But in my mind, I can do anything!

[~liz Wessel]

What comes to mind for me is a familiar song by Carole King called "Up on the Roof."
Yet, as a child my secret hiding place was under the canopy of a mulberry tree. Her long branches hung low to the ground and curled in on themselves, her foliage shielded me from view. It was a place to call my own. Climbing her limbs provided a great vantage point for looking out and watching the comings and goings in the neighborhood without being noticed. Her nurturing space held a magical quality,especially when my friends joined me in games of make believe.
I feel most at peace when I am in nature.
Lovely photo, Erie.

[bonnie jfaulkner]

As always Chip I enjoyed your Hiding Place essay. It made me think about my own and it is of course the stage hiding behind other characters and emotions where one is free to express the full outcry of human
experience without criticism or remorse. I have recently added 23 videos on youtube BonnieJFaulkner if you or your readers are interested. Keep up the marvelous work. It is greatly appreciated and needed. Fondly, Bonnie

[Shawna]

Thanks for your comment on my blog - nice to find yours.