the scent of water

Step One

I was going to start the post off with a lovely photo of my graying roots (please season that last phrase with a great big dash of industrial strength irony if you would be so kind) but decided at the last minute to go with Miss Flora Pink, Standing in The Corner looking Lost and Lonely in a Beseechingly Melancholic Way instead.  You can thank me later.

I don't know how it is that you make sense of the world, but for me I do it by taking the known facts and throwing them on a canvas of metaphor and symbolism, moving everything about until some kind of a coherent story forms.  Which brings us back to the graying roots.

I have a lot of them.  Can't even tell you when they started exactly; I've been dying my hair since I was 16 and have never taken a lot of notice of what was going on underneath all that colour.  I've been every shade from black to blonde, and it used to be a lot of fun.  Now, not so much.  Now it feels more like just another covering up of a part of myself that I had decided somewhere along the way wasn't acceptable in polite society.  You can see where this is going.

I'm growing those babies out.  I'm growing them out as an outward symbol of an internal revolution .  I'm growing them out as a physical amulet against the times my courage will inevitably falter in my resolve to become the person, the whole person, and nothing but the person I was born to be. I'm concerned I'll look a great deal older than I need to, yes.   I'm certainly not about to give up on taste, and style, and really cute shoes.  But the looking old thing is not enough of a reason to keep me from showing my true colours anymore. 

I think I just heard some kind of cell door open up somewhere.

(I think I also heard Cyndi Lauper burst into song during some kind of pre-teen eighties flashback, but that's not nearly so poetic so I won't mention it.)

You can't get where you're going if you don't know where you are*

I saw an old school friend in the aisle of a supermarket the other day and ducked down into a different aisle so she wouldn't notice me. She was a good friend, a kind friend - I couldn't bear the thought of her seeing me as I am now. Lost.  Dreary.  Barely even here.  I would have had to admit that I haven't yet even begun to fulfill all that promise I once had.  Worse, I have become precisely the sort of person I swore I never would.

If I spent my first few weeks here weeping (and I did), then I am now beginning to notice the first few dots of light around the edges of my grief.  Though it hurts (God, it hurts) to admit that I haved lived as little more than a bad actor playing myself for so much of the past couple of decades, I can recognise that moving 'home' has been a catalyst in facing up to the fact.  And better to do it now, than in another twenty years.

Which also opens up the possibility to come out from under my own shadow and begin my self again, this time for real.  What that means, exactly, I don't know.  I do know that it is more than time enough to find out.

*Title courtesy Superhero Journal

I found these inspirational, and I thought you might too.

A Poem.

A Work of Art.

Untitled

"Naught is possessed, neither gold, nor land, nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow, nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me. ”

~ D.H. Lawrence

As proof that miracles happen, I finished something.

A present for a niece, by request. (You can find the pattern here.)  I suspect that she would prefer something a great deal less subtle than these, but alas for her I was in the mood for grey.  Slowly freezing to death will do that to a person. 

For my own pair I decided on red, because if I am going to have to die of cold I may as well do so with flamboyance.

I believe that the rose would argue for a more graceful demise, and I would be the first to agree that her way of doing things is an astoundingly beautiful one.