...and then i did a thing

OK so I'll give this a try. This is a provisional and incomplete and very imperfect explanation for why I shaved my head.
My primary teacher in grad school, Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, learned so much from her experience of losing her hair during chemo that she recommended that every woman with a deep interest in gender shave their head. When I read that (I must have been in my late '20's), it drew me and also scared the shit out of me. So I put it aside and vowed to do it someday.
Welp, here I am at 50, cognizant and a little surprised that it has taken me so long to feel strong enough and loved enough to undertake the experiment. But seeing Sinéad get eaten alive by the poisons of this world made me realize that there was something about *myself* that I was grieving, some way of being that I hadn't yet stepped into.
So was it about politics? A hearty yes! I've always admired that brave radicalism shared by women like Ani DiFranco (for whom I named my firstborn) and Annie Lennox. I'm all about that kind of liberatory chutzpah to have "the courage of your convictions" - risking your own comfort to step outside normative beauty conventions, designed to keep us small, fungible, unthreatening to the status quo which undergirds systems of exploitation. So I did it! And it's been awesome! And fascinating. As a gender experiment, it exposes so much about our culture's preoccupation with femininity as a symbol of erotic power (and sources of power for women in this culture have been far and few), a kind of social capital or currency. It has also made me recognizable to a whole new set of people, and has made me either invisible or suspect to others. I have found my people in the pom-poms that have been waved, not just from change-workers fighting for liberation of all kinds, but also the hoop-hollering of free spirits from very different walks of life. And those who are scared cowed stuck obedient have been more than indignant... more like triggered! MY HEAD has, somehow, hit them very personally. So that all has been fascinating. And not precisely in alignment with my study of ease this month, since it has been pretty intense. But it required a certain amount of ease and open space to DO it, so in that way it's fitting. Meaning, I don't think I could have done it while in the rhythm of teaching, because there's a really fragile period where you want to be able to honor the pace of public exposure based on how vulnerable you feel on a given day. And of course beauty norms also keep us busy keep us running to keep up, and not having a huge unruly mop HAS given me new and unexpected forms of ease and spaciousness - omfg the amount of paraphernalia wrapped up in hair management! AND as much as pleasure is a cousin to ease, I can't begin to describe what it is to turn over on the smooth pillow in sleep, to feel the sun on my scalp, to swim - to swim! - holy shit y'all... to swim underwater. Anyway it's all part of the same process of healing from the more toxic presumptions lurking under the churn of American daily life.
So that's kind of the political side of things.
But I knew going in that shaking one thing up always shakes up others, and that's what really interested me.  I wanted to move towards what's scary in order to unsettle what had become sedimented, tamped down, compacted in me, reshuffling into a new shape. Not a new "look"; a new INNER shape. Among the radical feminists, there was something unique about Sinéad that moved me, a part of myself that I wanted to get closer to. She was a mystic with one foot in this realm and the other walking with the divine. She existed in that liminal zone that I call home, that experience of existing "in the world but not of it."  And THAT'S the heart of this experiment - stripping away the inessential, the surface image, to get closer to the essence of things. A purification. 
  ACK! It's much, much harder to speak to the spiritual side of things, which I always feel very tender about, sometimes so much so that I put on a kind of cool-kid-teenager persona to protect hallowed ground. In certain parts of South Asia, one never utters aloud the name of one's beloved because it's that precious. I get that. It's hard to put into words the perspectival shift in leaning into surrender, tilting towards the Otherworld, out of a yearning to know God consciousness more deeply. And for me, the call of the divine has always asked for a kind of emptying of self that shifts me into this spontaneous authenticity where I don't will my words or actions, they simply move through me. My bodymind just this side of music. That's the place I teach from, which is why teaching is so healing to me, centering me inside my purpose, my connection to the divine. Which is *also* why I so rarely take time off! All to say: I miss you. But I feel super dropped in, and the mystery of this sacrifice/offering/risk - is part of that. It's the simple give and take of ritual, and I feel all these gifts pouring in, too many and too all-at-once to be able to name here or yet.
​So for now, that's what I got...