One Dark Morning

Greetings to the dark morning, a cave of quiet inside gentle raindrops' canopy. The dripping window panes are a looking glass, welcoming me to recognize my reflection in the wet, budding trees receiving the day and the deep clouds of refreshment at their upturned fingertips. The warmth of the armchair and comforter ask me to be soft; my baby's restlessness and his heavy breathing compel me to stillness.

Hunger and exhaustion, insistent guests in this body, are telling me with their urges that I am alive, I am awake. As my child cries out in his sleep and nestles closer to my chest, these rhythms - our parallel heartbeats, our complimentary breath, the rainfall of a beginning spring day - align me to awareness. For a time, I hold what is vulnerable and yearning in the world. My ears are tender to the cries, my heart to the heaviness, my body to the weariness.

I let the rain seep into the Soul of Life I carry and quench the parched thirst for rest and comfort. There is no insulation from the worries and woes but there is cleansing. I allow these burdens to feel malleable and mutable - they atomize and fall like drops to water seeds of attention in my being. I touch my child's hand though I cannot see, inhale, and sigh. I accept. I hold. I release.

The birds begin their singing.

Growing Softer

I run a hand along my calf to feel the difference. Raising my arms above my head, I notice the dark patch between my arm and torso. A new portrait of myself: bare face, stretched belly, hairy legs and underarms. More roundness, less symmetry.

My son crawls up to me as I dress for the day, catches my eye in the mirror, and smiles his two-toothed grin. Arriving at my feet, he reaches out and gently rests a hand on my leg for support as he wobbly stands. The months have flown, my hair has grown, but my fuzzy shins cause my baby boy no offense. As I scoop him up and he wraps my neck with his arms, I realize again the many levels of my life he has reformed.

Because of my son, I have made the intentional choice to let my body hair grow. I could half-joke and say the reason is that I no longer have time to shave in the shower. The real reason is that, when I thought about why I did, I could not convincingly say it was because I wanted to. When the day comes that, instead of babbling sweetly, he offers a question about my choices, I want to answer him with honesty.

I remember the embarrassment and shame I once felt as a young woman when signs of maturation first sprouted. The hair on my legs was a glowering advertisement that I was not yet allowed to shave, physically and emotionally caught between stages of adolescence. The hair on my underarms was a bitter annoyance as, drawing a blade across delicate skin, I felt the sting of shearing unsightly evidence of womanhood. Like menstruation’s secret rhythm of moods and months, hair removal was a private ritual that punctuated my weeks and demanded investments of time, money, and energy. Whether or not I had shaved dictated my clothing choices, my confidence, and my sense of acceptability. Rather than an initiation into womanhood, I felt hair removal to be a necessary burden in the business of becoming a woman.

According to one British survey, women spend 72 days and $10,000 shaving over a lifetime. I could craft feminist arguments on the origins of this beauty regimen, capitalism’s perpetuation of the practice for profit, or the political statement made by shaving, or not shaving, or being a conscious person and still choosing to shave. I am not interested in making an argument, but in making my life a reflection of truth for a small human whose inquisitive eyes will see beyond smooth skin and shallow defenses. It may seem silly, but this concrete preoccupation is one of my many. What other ways do I conduct my life according to thoughtless conformity?

This whole-self alteration is harder than lathering up lotion and grabbing a razor. It means that, when I slipped on my first skirt of the season, I had to relive the awkwardness of adolescence all over again. Will anyone notice my leg hair? It sounds shallow and self-absorbed, but it was real. Then, of course, I saw it was unreal. No one noticed or, if they did, it did not matter. The practice of bearing my body just as it is requires that I find ways to look at myself as beautiful without mediation. I must take control of my opinion of my appearance, the way I spend my money, the matters to which I give my hours. What will I do with 72 days and $10,000? with a newfound authenticity?

By letting go of this cumbersome ritual, I am discovering the value of being less polished and more vulnerable. In my son’s smiling eyes, I am painted in motherhood’s media: more pastel than pen-and-ink, less like a sculpture chiseled from blades but more like a molded clay figure – earthy and honest, a figure growing softer for the sake of living truthfully.

What We Can't Keep

There are days that defy description, that cannot be captured in any dimension but the aligned experience of the present. Today became such a series of moments that led to greater luminosity and clarity. 

Sharing a spontaneous morning heart-to-heart with a mentor helped to reconcile my immanent personal discernment with a vision of my Life Path. Spending time charging my spirit in the sunshine as I did work that connected me to the stories of people in prison in our country - that brought into relief new understanding of how my freedom is bound to theirs - reminded me of the privilege I am granted to bear their lives in my heart. Writing notes to strangers while seeing them through the eyes of people who love them drew me deeper down into the vibrating network of relationships that I am ever enmeshed in, but often forgetful of. Making another spontaneous connection with a friend who is a flame of inspiration to me grounded me in gratitude for the vital necessity of his life - of all manifestations of Life and the helpers, like him, who tend it.

Walking with my dogs, my husband, my child into a beautiful sunset moved me to try to take a picture, for I so wanted to hold it, to keep it...but I found the photo a far inadequate visage of the sunset's beauty and power, the way the light held everything in that moment, the way all our eyes were drawn into the vastness of a sky heralding transition, the fleeting illusion of color and contrast that, in all its ethereal wonder, was real. All I could do was look at my son, my husband, my dogs - beings I love beyond love - glowing in the close of the day, and feel the ache in my heart that reminds me that I have been touched, that I am alive.

The way my life is shaped by the people who form its lattice of love is beyond explanation. The hazy film of energy I see settling on an evening, the atoms pulsing and swirling as trees and fields of grass, surpasses my ability to ask if anyone else can see it, too. A day that can carry me from one place to another, though I find myself tonight in the same bed from which I rose this morning, is a mystery to cradle in sleep. In awe, I surrender to dreams this transitory gift as an offering to be woven into my neural memory, to be sacrificed to the common spirit, to be let go with bewildered thanks.