http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7aMrkGBDBQ(unable to put actual clip on here, just have to click on the link)
This clip reveals something deeply significant about what is real safety, and what we really need as human beings.
The little girl in this scene is scared. Rightly so. Her dad has been out working late, leaving his 5 year old daughter alone in a scary neighborhood. He finds her under the bed and wants to assure her that she will be ok.
Every parent has found themselves in this situation. And it is what he does that is so brilliant.
He could just tell her that she needs to get some sleep, forcing her to get out from under the bed, very easily shaming her for being scared in the first place. This shaming would lead to a feeling of being missed in her fear, leading her to accuse herself for having any kind of feeling in the first place. She is left feeling alone. She is scared and alone. Now that is scary.
But what he does is not only validate her fear, he engages her world. He leaves the rational world of adulthood and moves into the heart of a 5 year old girl. How does he do this? He uses her language. He uses her imagination.
And this is what the girl needs. To simply be told that her dad would protect her is one thing. Her 5 year old brain would maybe hold some of those words, for maybe one second.
What he gives her is relationship. She is known by his ability to dream with her. Her protects her by inviting her to imagine.
That is safety. Not the circumstances. Not the facts. But whether you are with someone who can enter your world and know you through that. Safety in being known.
Safety is a space where words can be put to our experience. We need words. We need symbols, symbols that hold the medium of imagination and creativity, making meaning of what is going on instead of an unnamed dread. When we cannot make meaning of experience, it festers inside our bodies as a blob of confusion, like a parasite we cannot see but know is there because of its continual growth and disruption.
Leads me to think about artists. Often the most talented are the most neurotic. They're trying to work something out, something that is unnamed, something that needs to be expressed. And what better way than painting or making music. Unnamed meaning moves their bodies to create, funneling their confusion and desire onto a painting or into the keys of a piano or strings of a guitar. Thank God. Their work touches so deeply our own stories of confusion, allowing us to meet over something that names so well what we feel.
That is what makes the scene so touching. A man who enters the imaginative world of a child. And because of this she is not alone. She is safe in being known.
