Joining Lisa Jo and Emily today for 5 minute Friday, where you write without editing or backtracking, in a 5 minute stream of consciousness that could go anywhere .
Word for today...
Change...Go...
Trembling in front of the mirror, on my sixteenth birthday, I cut all my long blond hair off.
Later, with a pounding heart I watched the pink and black dye rinse down the drain.
Yet, somehow I didn't feel the smallest pang for those childish blond curls the piled upon the bath rug.
Those blond curls were the vulnerable girl, the shy, quiet girl that had let herself be hurt. They had to go.
Be cut off, shrouded in the colours of a symbolic death.
It was like clutching hold of the sharp edged stone of my childhood and throwing it into the deepest of water.
A place from which it could never be mined.
I wanted to change my life and somehow thought that meant starting from the outside in.
16 years on and my roots have slowly grown on back through, and my truth with them.
I have come to see the truth in myself, and others, however vulnerable that might be, as the only way to live in this world.
I can't change for anyone else anymore, I can't even change to protect myself anymore.
I have to be who I am and live it out.
Though change still happens.
it now expands from the inside out,
rather than retreating from the outside in.
Like ripples in a lake or rings within the trunk of a tree.
The finger marks in a piece of wet clay turning upon the wheel;
Layer after layer somehow grows bigger, more out of me.
Encompassing more and more of life in all it's complexity, sorrow, sacredness and beauty,
