Skip to main content
Owen has an alter ego.  He first told me about him two years ago in a confidential interview.  His name is Ace.  He has brilliantly scarlet hair.  He wears a long fitted black jacket, boots an elfin bow and a broad sword.  He is outgoing and graceful, athletic and fearless.  Owen told me that whenever he spins circles in the back yard he is being Ace in a richly imaginative world, complete with monsters to battle and epic challenges to overcome.  Owen has been wanting vibrant red hair for a year now and I have always said no.  In order to dye his gorgeous locks, one first needs to remove that rich walnut hue with bleach and then lay some red color on top of that.  It doesn't last long and it's pricey.  Owen finally said, "Mom, I feel like I need to be more like the me inside of me.  I want to dye my hair."  Well who am I to stand against self expression and so yesterday, while at the Italian Festival in Belmar we wandered into the Paul Mitchell School and Owen and Ace united in expression.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
September 13, 2010 at 7:34 AM
Wind said…
Freedom! Woo-hoo! We celebrate you Owen!
September 15, 2010 at 4:17 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much.  It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall.  The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep.  But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy.  I am a woman who loves the spring.  I nearly live for it.  When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis.  I gorge.  This year has been hard.  Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally.  The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...
2 comments
Read more

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment.  It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float.  It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within.  It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains.  Eyes closed.  Eyes opened.  A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being.  It takes courage.
4 comments
Read more

grief

Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the ...
4 comments
Read more