i managed it. i met my childhood friend at the BART and walked the uncomfortable walk from there to where i live and managed the interactions of being out in public under wraps with my shaved head. and then my table of friends, who are also neighbors, came out to our courtyard and witnessed and offered clippers and showed me what spots i missed and we all just relaxed into the new year togetherwith everything strange finding some level of normal. and it was good. and we were good. and i was good. and the new new year began in this way.
and then this morning, as a kind of reward for living authentically, and doing what i needed to do, and being in the now of this moment, i found the otis series on the feminist art movement and art made at the women's building and watched the incredible rachel rosenthal otis interview and thought, "oh, that's it. it's shero worship." and now i can add to the list that is forming, yet another reason i have shaved my head.
i'm making the list out of fear? out of wanting to practice an answer? out of a need to prepare myself for encounters before they arise? out of discomfort? i find i want to order and number my "why i shaved my head" responses, so i can"arm" myself with them--not meant in the military sense of arm, but rather to arm myself--meaning to add arms to myself--like the hindu mother goddess.
and then, the stories of women in the feminist art movement play behind my meanderings of mind as i write these words and i get off it. i will meet the moment, the critique, the story, the individual energy in the moment it is offered and i'll say whatever is true then, in that encounter, and i don't need to practice anything or prepare anything--i can just be in that moment then, when it occurs, and say what is so when i get there.
ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
this is the deal. to arrive in life as it lives itself. to do what there is to do. to say what there is to say. i shaved my head so i could know what it feels like to grow my hair. i shaved my head so i could be present in the miracle of seeing my selfish portrait--my selfish choice--to know what it is that i look like wihtout hair. i shaved my head so i could wake up and see rachel rosenthal's bald head and to find this otis series of interviews and know that i am on an authentic path--my authentic path--and that the beacons that have always been mine--the lighthouses casting their searching beams into the waters i am still alive in--are still casting their searching beams--not by searching--but by beaming. beaming. she is beaming for me, just as she did that first night in that grand opening of highways all those years ago when i was there with my cousin charlie--with my mother's cousin charlie--being the serving girl for the opening night in the mobile image offering of the electronic cafe back when the world was new to the world wide web that they helped establish as real. i don't like full stops. i don't like stop signs at the end of sentences or streets. i write without periods, because no one should ever have more periods than they need to have given the intensity of menstral cycles. ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh, i am finding my self, my strength, my voice again. i am arriving again in my moments of being myself. i am on a well travelled path of real voices alive in still living women who forged this trail. i am here. i am learning. i am alive.
ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, i am alive again.
who knew shaving my head would give me such a new lease on unleashed????
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