Sweet Potato Haircut

I first wrote it as, “baring witness,” as if the phrase had something to do with raw exposure, shiny canine teeth unfurled between wide lips, something related to vulnerability or nakedness. The images in my mind were abrasive and disquieting, like being forced to watch something you didn’t choose to see, something exposed, bare, before your eyes and you become an unwilling witness to the baring. I decided that to write “baring witness,” diverted any confusion away from the word bear, which conjured up a memory:

Camping in Colorado with my brother and waking to the panicked voices of our tent neighbors early in the dawn, looking out the front door flap with squinty morning eyes to see a stout black bear, rummaging through the snacks of the tent next door, the amateur and apparently munchy couple watching as she slashed through the blue windbreaker walls of their quickly collapsing abode.

That bear came vividly to my mind, and I decided it made no sense to place that bear into this phrase of baring witness.

Bear, BEAR, bear,

B E A R, beeeeeear, beaaar, bearrrrrrr

bearbearbearbearbear

To bear. A verb. A poignant and almost tangible verb, and in its sloping, tender letters I can feel the weight of it, the bearing, something nearly unwilling about it as it falls softly, heavy, sweetly suffocating, bearable, or unbearable. Regardless, there is a question of if I can withstand the weight, of its bearability, of my ability to bear

to bear

to bear

whatever needs bearing.

Then the tenderness enveloped me:

Bearing witness.

The heaviness of seeing. Not the baring, but the afterward, where the weight of watching life move in its dark and beautiful dance becomes something you must bear, and the possibility that it might be unbearable to witness, sometimes, the shadowed, sprawling arms and legs composing darkness across the day, the shapeless dark that bears down on its witnesses. We bear witness, alone and together, the compounded and shadowy burdens claiming us as their witnesses, destined to bear whatever weight they carry.

In this process of piecing together meaning from these assembled letters, I now find myself feeling close to the heart of us, of humanity, of we the messy and fragile and whole. We, the bearers of all that we have witnessed during the fragmented dance of living, we who pass each other on the sidewalk or the freeway or the stairs and see each others eyes, unwittingly bound to each other by our bearing of existence.

May we recognize the bearing of any and everyone we have ever seen or met, everyone we will ever see or meet, our bearing witness of being that binds us to each other and to the movement of life.

How can it be that words might unfold these resonant and tender truths?