i shaved my head

i shaved my head because i said i would.  i shaved my head because it is a spiritual tradition in many faiths.  i shaved my head because i wanted all the memories that grow in hair to leave me for a moment.  i shaved my head because i wanted to demarkate the end of my married life and the beginning of whatever part of this life i am in now.  i shaved my head so that i could know what it is to start all the way over with something that is all mine.  i shaved my head so i could know what it is to be without hair.  i shaved my head to get rid of blonde and black and red and bleached and gray. i shaved my head to know stubble.  i shaved my head by myself, for myself, so that i could know the image i saw in the mirror when i finally looked at myself after all the cutting and the shaving was over.  i shaved my head so that i could be free.  free.  freedom's just another world for nothing left to lose--thank you janis joplin, for still singing in my hairless head.  i shaved my head so that i could learn to wear a scarf.  i shaved my head so that i could know the shape of it.  i shaved my head so i could feel, again, that place at the top where the god comes in.  that place that's left open in the skull--that sweet round soft place--i can feel it again.  it was some kind of strange joy to find it--to feel it under the razor that i took to my own head in the bath.  my razor--after shaving my legs and my underarms and all the places that one, when one shaves, shaves--after all that i took it to my head.  i had cut it down to the bone as close as the scissors would let me cut.  i haven't yet taken the knife to my head to pull back the bits of stubble and get to clean skin--i have seen that done--but i have not yet done it.  i have never done this before.  i have had others cut away to skin--but usually just the back of my head--with floppy bits on top left for me to hide one eye behind in some 1980s kind of nod to asymetrical.  here, i am something else.  a blob of skin in rounded bits of bulging under a hairless dome that no longer gives my huge cow eyes anything to hide behind.  what am i doing? what am i doing?

it is done, anyway.  there is no use asking "what am i doing" what what i have done is all the way done.  it is strange, this pursuit of symbols of spirit.  it is strange and strange and strange and strange and strange.  none of the goddesses i know of have shaved heads--and none have ordered me to do this through prayer or dreams or invitation of any other sort.  this is a purely willful act--my will--and i have done this thing.  if i were not so aligned with calling myself an artist, could i have done it?

i think about the women i know who've shaved their heads--NONE.  i think about the women i admire who shaved their heads for reasons of their own--sinead o'connor, rachel rosenthal--goddesses of a sort--living out there in the interconnected web of knowing something like nothing about them.  their what kind of aura? their artistic emanation aura--that reaches all the way to me across waves of pictures and sounds and i can claim to know something about something they represent.  rachel--as the grand damme of performance art who was the first, actually, to initiate me into some kind of knowing that *that* was the kind of art i make when i saw her performing at the grand opening of highways, judy chicago's old dinner party studio, in santa monica.  it was 1989? turning into 1990? i think? if i can remember?

i shaved my head so i could stop remembering. 

i shaved my head so i could demarkate the old life from this new one here--so i could let go of all the ways of knowing my hair, constantly growing from my head since somewhere inside the womb, could find its way to the buddha at the top of our jinglefruit studios stairs.  and i did it.  i did it to myself.  in the after midnight, post kisses all around but none of them too deep ways of the first moments of 2012, i took the courage of the unlabeled bottle mixed with whatever fuzzy peach juice we had around, and i grabbed the dull scissors off the collage table and i made the first cut.  the dyke bang cut.  judy calls it like she sees it.  i made the too close, one half inch left of perfect hair--the hair caroline colored blue that then faded out to bleached that was then growing in as whatever color my hair is under all the colors i've been asking it to try. 

i shaved all of that off my head last night--in the first new hours of the last new year.  this is the last one? really?

all year we'll be dillydallying with what the mayans meant when they made their elaborate calendar that comes to a close before the end of this year.  and the mayan i know--the sweet gift giver who has been feeding me coffee and giving me rides home in the later than the bart runs night will go back to his beloved home in the mountains and i will be here, still, under the stairs, in this space of time and  life called "recently shaved head" time.

recently.

the do is 8ish hours old now.

it is nice to count the hours of life.

i remember in the early days of both my birthed children how i used to count the hours of their magnificent breath of beautiful new life.  i am doing it for myself now.  i am birthing this bald head of mine out of the hair it had to grow and pass through, in order to arrive here in this moment of this time of my own rebirth.

oh, yes.  god.  writing does save my life, doesn't it? i shaved my head to rebirth myself.  symbolically, actually, in this way of perfect knowing i did it and i have done it.  and it doesn't undo any of the great things that have come from the growing of all that other hair.  but this new year and the hair i grow inside of it--this new year of new growing of new hair--this is my doing.  and i will see my progress and know its length and contemplate its natural color and learn to love myself through all the spiky ugliness of uncooperative new growth.  and it will come out of my head.  and i will learn, along with it, how to live this new, strange life of growing.

ohhhhhhhhhhh, this new strange life of growing.

this, i love.

i am conscious of the place i like to stop in the writing now--in the place where i find that one phrase--that sweet set of words that give me a whole days worth of worthy to contemplate.

i love being worthy of my own writing and my own words.  these, unlike all the books i wrote before, are for me.  to encourage me.  to keep me moving.  they are selfish portraits, too, in their way.  word stories no one might ever read.  one day, will i write for a reader? will i love for a lover? i think not.  this life is a selfish pursuit.  i am, it seems, doing it all for me.  loving, leaving, losing, letting go.  attachment disorder? anyone????

okay--funny--there--i give myself this place of loving and then take it away from myself in language.  this is a fascinating working of an inner mind.  hairless.  white.  pink.  sweet hands.

i miss miss sophie.
i shaved my head.
why is all this missing following me?