Finding Solitary Safe Spaces
A magnolia tree, ancient walls, and a decorative Baroque bell tower.
The stone archways are shady and pleasantly cool after my brisk walk in the sun. They seem to swallow all sound; the outside world is shut out completely except for the cooing of pigeons in the rafters and the call of a bird that might be a hawk high above. I’m breathing the quiet air of a square church courtyard with a perfect row of sturdy rough-stone pillars forming a cloister around a fairly simple garden. A white magnolia tree in full bloom and a statue of Mother Mary balancing on a sickle moon are at its centre.
I’ve chanced upon another safe space for my treasury. I collect them like other people collect film posters from the nineties or vintage toy cars. As far back as I remember, I’ve always had these safe spaces; as a child, they were small and cave-like, or up on my favourite climbing tree. Now they tend to be wider, often on hills or high vantage points. In a world that requires so much of my energy and attention, I need them. These are spaces where I feel confident that I am enough, right now. For my own sanity, to be at peace in my body and in harmony with the world around me, I seek them out and visit them regularly. I can highly recommend this practice to all of you.
This particular courtyard belongs to a small church in Hildesheim, perched on a hill, called St. Mauritius. According to findings from archaeological excavations, it might have been a pre-Christian place of worship before the area was colonized by the Franconian Empire. St. Mauritius’ ancient Romanesque walls, built between 1058 and 1072, were added onto the foundations of an even earlier chapel commissioned by Bishop Godehard, or Gotthard of Hildesheim, in 1024. This very chapel, under the walls of St Mauritius, is the spot where the famous bishop - one of the most significant medieval Catholic saints - chose to die as he felt the end of his life approaching in 1038.
The courtyard at St. Mauritius: a simple garden of box hedges and trees.
All of these historical layers I researched only later, at home. But back in the courtyard, I was struck by a sense of presence and peace and solitude that cocooned me in cold eternal stone, despite my current (future-oriented) insecurities, and rendered my fears ludicrous. I felt invited to linger, to sit, to sit with myself and my fears and my accomplishments and my strangeness and my love and my weaknesses.
What makes a safe space safe? And I mean safe for yourself, not necessarily safe with regards to interacting with others (that’s a whole different story). I spent some time pondering this since that day on the hill at St. Mauritius. Of course, that depends on the country you are in, it depends on your personal needs and preferences, and on your intuition. But here’s what characterizes a safe space for me:
Energy
The most important attribute of a safe space is its energy. Plainly put, it needs to feel right. This is quite difficult to articulate, and if I were a physicist I’d feel confident enough to explain the complex workings of magnetic fields and electric charges to you, how they build up and, most importantly, interact, around all kinds of things made up of particles – which is literally everything around us, including us. But since I’m not, I’m simply going to say that some places have invisible charges, which we can feel and measure but not really grasp or see. I think this is what gives a place a mood, a meditative friendliness or a menacing aura, a sense of being welcomed or not. I feel safe in places with energy fields that embrace me in my imagination, beckon me, invite me to stay and wait and listen to the world.
Solitude
I feel safe in spaces where I can go alone to gather myself as a human and reassemble all the bits that have fallen into disarray. Even though I am a very social being, I recognize that my energy field is different when I am alone. Large groups of people are not conducive to the kind of contemplation you expect to find in a safe space – their energy fields would start interacting with each other, multiplying each other to create a sense of directed (at)tension. This might be wonderful at a musical concert, but less so when I want to be undisturbed.
Silence
This does not mean no sounds at all, it means the right kind of sounds, pleasant and unobtrusive sounds that allow us to listen to our own thoughts. Sounds such as birdsong, distant music, bells clanging, laughter drifting on a breeze. Away from the clutter and bustle and noisy traffic of everyday life, away from profit-hungry business dealings and the clack-clack of high heels on marble and the sound of souls drowning their own guilt and shame in productivity. Perhaps we find sounds pleasant that wake a sense of nostalgia in our depths and remind us of a mythical lost Golden Age, when things were in harmony.
Trees are these magical beings outside of human time, to me.
Agelessness
Quite often, safe spaces have an ageless, eternal feel to me, or at the very least ancient – marked by structures that have been there for generations like a thousand-year-old stone wall, or trees that might have been saplings at the time of the French Revolution (I had a tree measuring phase not too long ago, where I would measure the circumference of particularly large trees I came upon to calculate their age with a species-specific formula[1]). These structures are often something large to lean against, to lean into. Often, I find there is this sense of something so huge and incredibly ancient and unfathomable that I feel awed by it. Put in my spot as a speck in the universe, not meaningless, but just very, very tiny and rather insignificant. There is a sense of continuity, of stone walls having watched people giving birth and dying, loving and aching, over and over and over again. A feeling of solidity and stability in all this dynamic change. And a sense of belonging, despite my insignificance - a sense of owning my place in this long chain of events that is part of a larger web.
Peacefulness
Above the silence and solitude, you need to be able to actually feel safe in a space like this. There needs to be a sense of peacefulness in its truest meaning, a deep knowledge and trust in the world that no-one can come here to harm you. As if a safe space like this is also sacred, to be left clean and unsullied by malicious thoughts, so awe-inspiring that even ill-minded beings sense its sanctity and enter a kind of truce with the world here. I need this space to be so safe enough for me to dig into my own shadows and bare my own faults to myself, a space where I can be vulnerable and weak – and I can only do that if I can let down my guard in a physical sense as well. It’s difficult to find a physical safe space in countries that are collectively traumatized by crime or war.
Rhythm
Lastly, I often find that safe spaces have a kind of meditative rhythm or monotony about them, like a visual pattern of archways in regular intervals, or a sound like ocean waves crashing on rocks, the tugging of the wind at tall trees, an endless horizon, the flickering of a candle flame or open fire. We as humans have an affinity for pattern and rhythm, we like repetition because it creates a sense of harmony. It soothes us.
Ancient stones have a unique capacity to store history inside themselves, like sponges of layered meaning. There is something powerful about a road built by the Romans two millennia ago.
Of course, these traits of what makes a safe space overlap and interweave and influence each other; it’s difficult to pick them apart or discuss them individually. Often, I don’t have time to go out and actually visit a physical safe space – as might be the case with all of you in different lockdown situations now. Obviously, it’s possible to recreate these spaces in your mind.
I’ve had an imaginary safe space, my ultimate safest of all safe spaces, in my mind for years now. It’s a garden – sursprise!! – on top of an ancient stone tower, with a vast and spectacular view of an untamed and unfarmed circular horizon of hills. This place is a refuge, a source of energy, a space so intimate and private and sacred to me that I will never take anyone with me there in my process of imagining it. There are other imaginary gardens and spaces for social encounters. This is mine alone, in my very centre. A space where I can only reach on my own, which no-one could ever find, not if they could enter my mind, and not in all the parallel worlds of all universes, because I have to travel through myself to get there.
You can have your own physical and imaginary safe spaces too. A space where you recharge your batteries, where you learn to breathe until that knot in the pit of your stomach slowly unclenches. A place outside of time or space, where you sit with your vices and virtues, where you get the energy to decide to make something meaningful out of your life.
All illustrations and photographs by Nora Kovats ©.
[1] This is a great site for European trees: https://www.baumportal.de/baumalter-schaetz-o-meter.