“Letting Our Hair Down”: (aka: The Risk & Beauty of Bold Bigness)

Aug 6, 2014 | Musings From A Prayerful Heart

Picture

I wore my cherry-red dress and shimmery gold pants to Ecstatic Dance last Sunday (dressing up for God again) and I was playfully inspired, as I have been more so lately, to bravely let down this wild mane of golden curls, and dance with my immense hair all over the place. The response was really interesting! People seemed to really like this wild-haired version.

I’ve been thinking about this idiom “Letting Your Hair Down,” since it’s been many years since I really let my long curly hair all the way down for more than a few minutes while it’s drying, or of course while sleeping. Mothering young children with small grasping fingers, needing to focus on many life tasks at once,  has naturally inspired the impulse to pull my thick curls up, back, off my face, and away.

It’s a slightly uncomfortable edge of extra “bigness” for me to allow this wild mane to just be as it is, nakedly uncaptured by a rubber band. Already 6 feet tall and statuesque, with a very large soul presence; the big bounty of golden curls has just seemed, well, you know, maybe… a bit much?  (But a bright red dress is fine. ;-))

It’s interesting what feels uniquely bold to us, what feels daring or edgy, what feels like “letting our hair down.” What is it for you, right now, in your life? What’s your risky growing edge of letting your hair down?

Ironically, I remember the January I turned 25, “letting my hair down” in that moment looked like shaving my head. I was so aware in that maiden stage, as a young devotee of truth, how distracting my hair was in the world, to myself, and to others, as an obsessive tool of sex-appeal.

And so, bravely, one morning living above the ocean in Bolinas, I shaved it all off, and then tossed my long blond locks into the ravishing waves. And then, in the months that followed, was somewhat the disappointed young nun, to realize that shaving my head was not the simple escape from maiden sex-appeal I had hoped it would be.

40 years old now, deeply comfortable in my own skin, clear about who I am and am not, having swelled and shrunk with pregnancy and childbirth twice now, married and divorced, heartbroken open, healed and whole, alive as love itself, surrendered to living service, I can freely let my hair down, literally, and so to speak, in all the ways I’m called.

I can even let Love’s outrageous sex-appeal shine, this holy eros, because by now I know what hair is, and what hair isn’t (thank goodness); because I belong to myself, to God, and to this Love which is discerning integrity, generosity, grace, and truth, above all else.

If it is distracting, it is Love’s distraction.
If it is attracting, it only attracts Love more deeply home to itself.

I remember when I was a teenager, already 5’11, and someone would refer to me as “big” and I would feel a pang of self-rejection and then correct them: “I’m not big, I’m tall.” How did “big” become such a dirty word as a description for a woman?

I can still feel it, can’t you? For men, it seems, the bigger the better, right? But women should be lithe, thin, small, light. Elegant’s fine. Graceful is good. Regal: borderline. But Big? Mmmm, nope.

I can feel this energy now, the edginess of bigness, as I walk more boldly into the spotlight of my life, giving in and letting go to the bigness of Love that wants to use my entire life in its outrageous flood of authentic generosity.

I can feel the shame of bigness. The internalized voices of “How dare you? Who you do think you are? To shine like that? How dare you take up so much space? With your heart? With your light? With your voice? With your sexiness? With your hair? Shhh! Be small, be good, be quiet, be invisible, blend in.”

Love says: “Actually? I am uncontainably huge. I am hot. I am whole. I am holy. And I am free.”

It’s not about making oneself big. It’s about relaxing, finally, into the bigness that is already here, the bigness that I am, the bigness I have always been; the immeasurable bigness that is your vast and vulnerable heart, your fiery truth, your exquisite risk of real love.

Because really, truly friends, we know that letting our hair down is not about the hair.  But it is an interesting idiom. (And I really truly do want to know how you are letting yours down?) And I do believe I am going to experiment, more and more, with letting mine down, in all the outrageously beautiful ways I possibly can. <3

Facebook Comments

More Blog Posts

Opening Wider & Diving Deeper into the Immeasurable Beauty & Pain of Life

It’s not a spiritual requirement to be fascinated by what inhibits our greatest aliveness; and somehow compelled to uncover and reveal surprising pathways to deeper freedom.

And yet it did resonate for me when recently I heard brilliant author Brene Brown say: “Our capacity for whole-heartedness can never be greater than our willingness to be broken-hearted.”

Yes, thank you. When we discover firsthand the direct relationship between meeting […]

Oedipal Bliss

My sweet boy Ezra Star (6.5) jumped onto my lap today, throwing his little arms around my neck, and apparently milking the Oedipal Phase for all it’s worth, announced: “You know, Mama? We can’t really get married to each other. Even if we wanted. Because you are 41, and I am 6 1/2. And it’s just NOT appropriate.”

I burst into giggles and kissed him on both delicious cheeks: “No? That wouldn’t be appropriate?” He laughed too: “No! Even though […]

Lessons of Choice, Failure & Forgiveness

n these last weeks I’ve been pondering the tender intersection of choice, failure, and forgiveness.

Always poignant topics inside a human life vulnerably given to the forces of love and loss, what has driven these issues directly and painfully home to my personal heart of late is the rather angst-filled decision to let our sweet, amazing dog, Ekara Faith, return to the breeder from whom we received her in December.

And let me assure you, right from the start of this tender story, that while it is an intensely difficult choice, I completely trust this is the right choice, the wisest, most compassionate choice~ for this incredibly beautiful dog (who will now be devotedly trained to become a service dog for someone in need) as well as for my broken-hearted family, who truly wants the best life for Ekara, even more than we want to get to love her personally.

After many months mixed with incredible love and intense challenge, realizing we had made a commitment to loving an intensely intelligent dog who needs (and deserves!) […]

Good Enough Again

Last Sunday I had one of those days. It was like a Jesua version of Alexander’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

One thing after another went askew. I won’t even bore or depress you with the detailed account of everything that went wrong. It was like a comedy of errors, except at the time it really didn’t seem funny to me at all.

All day long I barely held it together; triggered by circumstance, humbled by hormones, and challenged by life’s sometimes mean and messy ways.

Finally, when I arrived home that evening, late of course, I walked in the door and Ekara, our 5 month old puppy immediately jumped up onto me and tore a hole in my longtime favorite, most beautiful hooded sweater.

The one I wear every day, through all the seasons~ to work, to be cozy […]

The Blood Test: A Mundane Story of Wound & Repair

Yesterday I had to take my beloved boy Ezra (6) to get some follow-up blood work at the doctor office to investigate more thoroughly some of the numbers that had returned from the tests we had gotten the week prior. Nothing dramatically troubling at this point, just some slight abnormalities worthy of investigation.

Well, needless to say, getting blood drawn from his arm is not my boy’s favorite way to spend a free morning with his Mama. But Ezra is a pretty fearless soul by nature, and so he was buoyant and open-minded until the actual moment came, sitting on my lap in the lab, with the rubber tourniquet tight around his upper arm, while we removed the bandaids that had numbing cream under them, in support of inviting as painless a procedure as possible.

We watched as the nurse kindly and gently prepared the needle and vials in front of us, and then suddenly I felt Ezra tightening and tensing his body against mine, everything in his body instantly transforming into “No!”

The nurse opened the needle and I held his arm steady. And then he suddenly strongly twisted his arm out of the range, making the vein inaccessible, and began resisting, loudly, saying: […]

Heart-Fed Babies Become Heart-Led People

I loved having babies. I loved the relative simplicity of that chapter of parenting. Such a physically raw time, yes, wow; literally growing their bodies from my own flesh and blood, my milk, my chi, my sleeplessness given, helplessly, to the devoted care of these young mammals.

But I loved how my job then was to just feed them my heart, carry […]

The Consequence of Truthtelling; Taking a Bold Stand for Love

This is such a loaded time of year, isn’t it? It can be a beautiful time, yes. Full of sparkly lights and brisk walks bundled in layers, sweetly, arm in arm. In this part of the Northern Hemisphere it is a time of turning inward, into the darker months, shorter days....

A Bone to Pick with God

A couple weekends ago I received the space to finally dive, ceremonially, into the angst and heartache I was carrying following the immensely stressful ordeal we recently went through with my beloved 9 year old daughter Arayla, in which I had been painfully forced to...

A Shark and A Boat

I've noticed the children haven't wanted to speak a lot with each other about Arayla's hospital journey. They've just wanted to recalibrate to one another, to play joyously as well as quarrel in familiar ways. Ezra( almost 6) and I definitely needed to process upon...