The need for occasional hiding, the inner sanctuary, the heart as hospital

*Still from La Dolce Vita (1960) by Federico Fellini

(A strange day yesterday wherein a few vulnerabilities were sparked, I found myself gravitating to some of my favourite images from a few films that have had great meaning to me, I'll add some thoughts to that at the end. The following was just written in a stream of thought while I awaited the bus to school today. Thoughts on self-care and the strange ways we can hide within ourselves. Perhaps, as well, making kind peace with that as a not unhealthy form of self care. Forgive it's divergent lines of thinking, hope you don't get tangled in its threads.)

There is a strange coping mechanism, not wholly unpleasant, in which after a patch of despair or a moment of rejection, I want to bury myself into my own obscurities. Whether my proclivities for abstract metaphorical meaning in some forgotten classic of European cinema or poetically informed texts on the nature of reality. A quick burrow into the folds of singularly comforting memories.

Here I venture into the quiet room one contains within oneself where one is not performatively responsible for making one's thoughts or feelings coherent to some judicious onlooker. These are sacred halls in which no product or idea, or worse still, persons are to be bought or sold. Acceptance is unconditional. Beyond just that, the question of acceptability need not be asked, here you are as accepted as the furniture in a room, the paint on the walls. (Though, perhaps, we might suggest that at times the furniture in a room no longer fits its purpose and may be replaced or reconfigured, the suggestion that a chair or a dresser should at any time attempt through insecurity to suggest that it is anything but a chair or a dresser perhaps expands the metaphors meaning).

I suppose the unique challenge is the malleable nature of being, we change (and thank God for that) but we also grow weary, there are not only wrinkles in our skin but in our personalities at times as well. Scars can be memories, of battle and overcoming, or of wounded defeat.

Anyways... allow yourself the retreat at times, into this inner sanctuary of self.

Here the walls are flickering screens of memory and meaning. Don't allow the voices of accusation or shame colour their images into harsh greys and black, instead visit your own obscurity, memories that hold infinite, if Inarticulate meaning to only you, safe for a time in the life-giving sustenance that is your own life. It makes meaningful demands, like the breath in one's lungs, returning to be filled once more. There is a home within you, and at times you carry it and at times it carries you, or hides you from the storm of life for a while.

Be kind and generous with all that wrestles within and without.

(For further thoughts in being inspired by this still and scene from La Dolce Vita:)

Marcello on the beach in the final moments of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960)

Marcello, the lead "hero" of Italian film La Dolce Vita, in the final scene (*spoilers, I suppose!*) beleaguered by a search for meaning in the modern absurdity of the world, ends his all-night partying with an odd scene on the beach. Here, fellow party-goers are enamoured by an odd beached creature. Some might speculate that it is a washed-up metaphor for wonder, spirituality and myth, that seems "dead" or at least lost in the existential experience of a post-war reality. In the distance, an earlier-met, minor character of a vivacious young girl attempts to communicate to Marcello from across the bay. She waves and her words are lost to the sound of waves. She, perhaps, represents another possibility. A youthful wonder that still brims with possibility, but Marcello is currently on the side of the party-goers, he sits with those who can only numb their passing years with entertainment and hedonistic pleasure. He has, for now, joined them, but there is an invitation, to find and reclaim some simpler view of life and the world. The credits roll and perhaps we are invited to ask the question: where do we find and seek meaning in the modern world? One of my favourite endings in a film, sometimes the question is more important than the answer.

The voice of hope, reason or loss perhaps? La Dolce Vita (1960)