I shaved my head today. Sure… there are no hairdressers working, but that is not why. I am drawn to do it almost annually. I just get the urge to strip away the layers in a tangible way, and it feels ceremonial each time I do.
There are a few things I love about it: how some people don’t recognize me, its as though we notice the frame more than the content of a face, or maybe we fail to look at each other with enough depth, curiosity, patience, courage, reverence? …to really know the face of another (or ourselves, as I surprise myself in the mirror for days even weeks each time I do this). Or maybe its just that how adults actually perceive each other is in a more ‘wholly beheld’ kind of way… our unique gestures, our presence, our familiar form in soft focus. Whatever it is, I love coming in closer contact with my world by removing my hair, by being shorn. I feel a bit more naked, a bit more known, a bit more exposed. I feel more too, more sensations, more self awareness, and the wounds on my scalp all show themselves…
I have many patches of psoriasis that are in full view now. And people can see my flaking inflamed skin, my bodies language for something I can’t express in words? But here it is now in plain view, this way maybe I can be present to it, tend to it. I have sometimes put liquid sunshine (vitamin D) on my scalp and I have had some real relief from the most entrenched and intensely irritated patches. I think about how only when I bring my wounds, my pain, into the open, can this treatment begin, or can the gentle caring and attention be offered. It is once again through a kind of vulnerability that healing is possible.
I have felt more vulnerable this weekend. I have found myself in deeper, more painful and more truthful contact with my family, and this time of isolation has felt harder on a weekend when community gathering and celebration might have abounded. Shared food, singing, and hunts for chocolate might have happened up and down the blocks. But instead we continue a kind of vigil for each other, and we receive further encouragement to be apart. Further reminders of our deep vulnerability…
It has been Passover and Easter weekend: the former, a holy day in remembrance of a people’s deliverance from slavery, cruelty and oppression against all odds; and the latter a Christo-Pagan allegory for overcoming suffering and death by going into and through them. I am more than ever with the reality that this time can, and possibly must, be a time to deeply reflect on what world we want to go on to… after this deepest vulnerability. We can’t wait for normal to resume… our wounds are showing now, can we tend to them?