A woman spoke with me after her double mastectomy. She couldn’t accept her body. We sought a new metaphor. Your chest is a sacred altar, and your breasts, the paschal lambs. “I look at myself now,” she later said, “and feel that I am sacred.”
I believe to begin again one has to search for a new, personal metaphor.
Start slow. What is comparable to the skin you wear every day? To what would you liken its color and landscape? Is it sand, vanilla wafer, maple syrup, wheat, parchment? Are you a mysterious, flaking scroll? Are age spots floating lily pads on the rippled lake of your skin? Do you have silver eel scars, bouquets of creases? If you were sand, which sand? Tide-washed Bermuda pink? Glittering Hawaiian black? Gray and moist? The blue veins inside your wrist, are they not the rivers of Eden? And your hair, is it glacial run-off? Mink? Straw? Fusilli?
Start slow with metaphor and then move up. Is your home a jungle, a gingerbread house, a jewel box, a cookie tray after the cookies have been scraped off?
Move up and then expand…Fear is a cricket in a warehouse, siren-loud but entirely squashable. Anger is acne clogging up love. Unforgiving is a slow, intimate poison. Loneliness is a fiercely protective beast. Self-pity is a lead shoe. Egocentricity is a hall of mirrors. A strong self-image is perfect lighting and a little airbrush.
Keep practicing with metaphor, and one day, you will be walking along, and it will grab you: the metaphor that is yours and only yours. You will catch your breath, and know a very high, private truth.
This metaphor will become your secret name, and by it you will know yourself, live in poetry, and begin again.
Zoe Klein is a rabbi at Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles. www.zoeklein.com
