A Silver Crown
silver roots.
bright buds.
regrowth.
new growth.
- here
Definition of Crowning Glory:
The most interesting or important thing that something or someone has to offer.
- Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Actually, there’s no such thing as silver, grey or white hair. The light-coloured strands I’m referring to have no colour at all. They are clear. Translucent. They appear silver, grey or white depending on the way light is reflecting on them.
Perspective is everything.
For many women, myself included, navigating the inevitable loss of natural hair colour is about much more than what is visible to the naked eye. A slow and seismic internal shift continues to raise all sorts of questions without any simple or soothing answers.
How do I feel about getting older? How do I feel about looking older? What contracts and closes me? What breaks me wide open to life and leaves me gasping? Am I giving myself full permission to explore my desires? How comfortable am I with reframing relationships, with beginnings, with endings?
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke invites us to:
‘… try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.’
And so, in spite of myself, I consciously make this choice every day. To love the questions and live everything. To leave nothing out. It is an intense way to live, and not without risk to the status quo. It is also a very rich way to be and do in life.
There is no filter applied to the image attached to this blog. I hadn’t seen my hairdresser for a couple of months. I’d been up till after midnight the night before drinking wine with a delicious girlfriend. I rose at 5am to taste the sunrise. In the subtle and clear energies of the dawn I lifted my face to the sky and abided in the experience of simply being present and aware; a spontaneous and sweet resting into the nameless and placeless source from which everything emerges and ultimately returns to.
It is always calling to us. It is always right where we are. Awareness is what we are.
My silver crown announces some of my story. I turned fifty-three this year. My children are making their own way in the world. As am I. I find this takes a certain kind of courage … le cœur from the French word meaning heart. Courage is to tell the story of your heart.
My crowning glory – and yours - is not limited to the tidily constructed one-liner of a dictionary definition. My crowning glory is the organic and mysterious unfolding of consciously choosing a heart-centred life; more connecting, more teaching, more travelling, more writing, more movement, more stillness, more sleep, more pleasure, more giving, more sharing, more laughter, more loving – always more loving – and knowing that somehow everything is enough right now. That this is a life well-lived.
Tat tvam asi. You are That.