Sweet Potato Haircut

My mind is a fervent, anxious machine who paces and strategizes around her many self-made dilemmas for the supposed sake of being prepared. She trembles at the notion of uncertainty, willing it ruthlessly away with exhaustive planning and over-examining, requesting reassurance often from many outside sources. Through my eyes she sees the TV, where specific body types correlate with finding true love and success, she reads endless, eloquent books in which through living meaningful lives and finding enough adventures people find satisfaction with themselves, she watches people scroll by, encapsulated in their photogenic lives for all to see until she can’t bear it any longer. Then she stacks the things she sees into tall comparative towers for me to climb, measuring the parameters of worthiness and acting as judge to the competition, as a representative of the ideals of the world as she understands them. I am never quite strong enough. 

She is immeasurably capable, more than she or anyone else can even comprehend, yet she is simultaneously so innocent, so gullible to the suggestions of others and quick to assume inferiority. She vies for the attention of my consciousness, shouting outrageous things across the warehouse of my skull until she says something frightening or hateful or incoherent enough to hook my energy into the tidal pull of her desperation. She writes these very words, she knows the groundedness of meditation and the pulsing beauty of the present, yet she suffers the great weight of fear and shame and ego, sicknesses that take their toll. I wish that I could tell her the things I know to be true, that the quality of a life is not measured by merely its contents but by the wholeness with which it is lived, the awareness brought to each moment. Washing dishes slowly and feeling the slippery warmth of the water running through the cracks of your skin, feeling the soles of your feet on the floor, the wind dancing with your hair, the delight of Twizzlers on your tongue. That even in stillness, in silence, she is enough, that there is nothing else she needs to do to be worthy of life, of universal love and tenderness. I wish I could plant flowers along the linings of my cranium, so that she could smell the sweetness and watch the colors bloom, petals unfurling their deepest pieces for her to see. My hope, someday, is that she might settle into the rhythms of being, watching from my eyes and acting as a mirror, reflecting simply what she sees as the beautiful people stroll past, as the sycamore sheds its twisty skin to the earth again, as the cars pass and the sun sets and life goes on. 

So I am teaching her to breathe with me, we take deep breaths when we see the body in the mirror and when we wake to a wide, eventless day to fill with nothing but our simple aliveness. We breathe and we try to remind each other that we are enough, and I’m learning to understand her sweet frenzy in my head as her own kind of love. And I try to love her right back.