There is a more vulnerable kind of writing that we all long to read, wishing for a true reflection of what lives inside us — and that we may be afraid to do and allows others to see. This is the kind of writing that can get so close to the heart’s yearning that the closer we get, the more our conditioned protections warn us away. So on this page, I want to let you know that I am no stranger to the kinds of things that you may go through when the desire to write arises. Whatever I know, I know from lived experience as well as inspiration and external learning. And so I want to share a bit of my own writing of this nature with you.

What you’ll be reading, here, is a reminiscence called “Postcards from the Lost World,” which I initially hand-bound as a book and hand-illustrated years ago. When I typed it up to include here, I felt so very grateful that I had written it back when I did, almost 20 years ago now, because at this point in my life I wouldn’t any longer be able to recollect in such clear detail the perceptions and experiences brought to life in that story. Re-reading it now, I am brought back to that delicate place of childhood when the connection with the invisible world is still alive and real, but on its way to fading out. How wonderful to be able to reconnect with that!

I hope that this writing from my soul will reverberate meaningfully in yours.

— Naomi Rose 🌺

Postcards from the Lost World

All through my childhood, I had experiences of what I later came to read of as "rips in the veil," the parting of a filmy inner curtain that revealed the other world, the world later described by poets and saints and mystics as "Paradise," or "the lost world." Perhaps because my own parents were dreamers, and for a long time fed me on their dreams, I felt more comfortable in the dream world than in the strange, often barbaric and competitive tussle of what was called "real life."

While I was young, and my heart quite open, these rips came as great gifts, like friends from long ago who lived closer in the heart than anyone I knew in person. I could never tell what would occasion these remembrances; only that when they came, there was a great swelling of joy, a recall of something very important, more important than whatever I was caught up in at the moment, and then, when they mysteriously faded away, I felt an enormous loss, a panic to be suddenly stranded here, in this body, in this bright, football-playing world where I was somehow to toughen myself that I too might, in my own way, bash my padded shoulders, my helmeted head against the world that would call me out onto some barren playing field and blow a piercing whistle and I would have to enter the fray.

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No heroic event, no stirring human drama, no recitation of the course of history stirred me more than these glimpses through the veil. When they came, they dimmed the human strivings as so much noise.

One recurrent scene came to me in the crib, and then again later in life, in the midst of an ordinary conversation or during a hard and despairing time. And this scene flooded me with a great golden hope beyond questioning, let loose unbridled certain joy and cellular knowledge of what I was and what for and why. It was simply this: a great cliff seen in sunlight, in the afternoon’s golden light, its massive outcrops copper in the light, the light the gold of just turning, just moving into sunset. And above the copper-glinting cliff a sky of turquoise blue. In my crib I lay looking at this old friend, this call to home, this landscape that moored me to something I could not ever name, but which I knew with my heart’s beat and life’s blood, and had always.

Although this scene came and went, always at its own bidding, never mine, its golden light followed me, invisible, through the gloom of later years. And something of its echo, as a felt sense rather than a vision, would be behind me or within me during precious or trying moments: walking barefoot, as a young child, on moist grass, wearing a sundress of yellow, with the yellow morning sun warm on my bare shoulders, bending down to smell a Black-eyed Susan, its deep dark center cupped by bright yellow petals. The cliff’s untold story stayed with me, invisibly, bringing the natural world into delicious, trustworthy focus, making it possible for me to yield myself to whatever, whoever of love was there: a flower, a grasshopper, Marais and Miranda singing deeply and sweetly from my record player, my velvet-soft mother’s grained, perfumed arms, my oversober father’s freshly shaven face. I was visitor, then, to this world, but one with unexpected postcards from home.

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My father, himself, was a rip through the veil, when I was young. He was stranger to me, and in some ways frightened me with his withdrawn presence, his silent, martyred loneliness. He played the role of Other so well, as men did and were supposed to do. So he left for the day, leaving me with my pincurled writer-mother, and returned at night, walking through the door with the evening cold still hanging on his topcoat. While he was doing well in the World Out There, the place to which he went when he was not in that door frame, returning, he treated us to all the wealth he was capable of. He brought me books and records, and jewelry, and summers in the country, and stories that he had gathered over the course of studying a secular human history, and stories he wrote himself, which was his business as well.

One day when I was in the bathroom and he was helping me wash my hands, he took a box out of his pocket and gave it to me. Inside was a ring with three turquoise stones, set horizontally in silver, As my father fit the ring on my finger, while the morning sun slanted gold-white through the bathroom window, a full sense of recognition came to me, without words or direct memory. It was the same feeling as watching the cliff. It opened an entire level of turquoiseness, and all that that meant, whatever it was: turquoise and silver jewelry, turquoise sky, my father’s wonderful hooked nose that he so hated and that I so loved. With this ring came the remembrance, not ever in words and barely in pictures, of all the many times I had been here before, just not as quite “me”; of all the many times I had stood open-hearted in a circle of light (this time in a bathroom, by the sink), all the many landscapes and city scenes I had known, from sunlit massive cliffs to cobblestone towns, all brought back in this moment of accepting the gift of the ring. This ring, which I received in full delight, married me to this turquoise world, whose threads would fade and almost sever, until, after many a far journey, they returned again.

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But until my heart broke, as a child, and therefore while I still could trust the world, it actually didn’t take much to bring postcards from the lost world through to me. I received the postcard while watching “The Howdy Doody Show,” sitting in my friend Marsha’s living room and eating sandwiches on TV trays in front of this new, strange box that showed black-and-white pictures.

I was entranced by the medium. I hated “Howdy Doody,” he and Buffalo Bob were insufferable and treated kids like morons; I hated the mean circus of its pranks, its loudness and stupidity. But I enjoyed one pompous marionette, Phineas T. Bluster, and I fell quite in love with a beautiful young maiden called Princess SummerFallWinterSpring. In her name, in her gracefulness, in her sweet poised walk, I felt my anchor, my innocence held and buttressed in a sunlight-cliff way. When they chased her with seltzer bottles, or tumbled her, unsuspecting, off heights onto a trampoline, when they made fun of her in any way, my stomach went into a terrified tumble of its own, and I felt physically sick. It was more than compassion, it was more than empathy, it was more than remembrance; it was a gut-level terror that the turquoise world would be somehow beaten down, mocked into nonexistence, and that no one would be there to anchor me to it. I would have to run away, or to join the mockers, to toughen my skin and laugh as though nothing hurt, nothing was wrong, when in fact, by this simple seltzer-attack on Princess SummerFallWinterSpring, the entire world was in grave danger.

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One day, during Assembly Period in perhaps third grade, I sat among hundreds of children fidgeting in hard wooden chairs, wearing the requisite white shirts and blouses of Assembly. I went through the ritual as usual: rising from the hard seat, singing the awkward “Oh Say Can You See,” obediently putting my right hand over my left heart — but not saying the Pledge of Allegiance, merely lip-synching along with the crowd so that I might walk that fine line between not standing out or being punished, yet not promising fidelity to something I did not understand or, in its obligatory nature, come to freely. Its sing-song over, I sat down with the others and waited for another boring speech to come from some teacher or the principal or a guest speaker, a speech that would make me dizzy with boredom and make the vertical folds of the curtains on the stage begin to shimmer and dance.

But this day, something different. A family of Indians, dressed up in nature costume: feather and buckskin, and beaded wondrous designs and colors. The Turquoise World had come to me, here in this ritual prison! A man and a woman and children spoke softly, then did a dance on the stage, and sang a chant in syllables that I seemed to know better than I knew my own language. Vowels, long and full: Heya, ho, heya, ho.

And the sunlight came not so much on them, in this dreary huge public school auditorium, not so much on them from the high, small windows, as from them, from within them. Gold light filled me, hearing them, watching them. I felt known, and rescued, and scooped up with kindness, and loved — more loved than I had known in this life so far.

How strange to feel this. How strange, when I knew full well, at the age of eight, my own name, my English/Yiddish-language history, the family stories, my address, my phone number, my middle name, the capital of France, the inventor of the sewing machine, how strange to want to leap up and out of my hard wooden seat and spring down the aisle and run up into the soft gold-streaming arms of these strangers dancing on the stage, to rejoin the circle of their musical light, to take them back and be taken back.

— Naomi Rose, copyright © 2001, 2007, 2024. All rights reserved.

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