Hair.

Hair is powerfully symbolic. 


Humans spend a lot of time on hair. Our hair - its length, style, and color, or our lack of hair - is a highly visible message to the world about how we see our self and how we wish to be perceived. 


Hair is both highly personal and very public. Folklore attributes hair with a variety of magical powers, even Biblical stories relate this ancient belief - remember the tragic story of Samson and Delilah? 


Horses are among the very few animals who have hair that is much like our own hair, and perhaps that is one reason many of us feel so connected to horses. We see a bit of ourselves in them, hair framing their faces much as our hair does...


As an artisan jeweler working in the realm of horses, I work with a fair amount of horse hair, both in custom work and in work of my own inspiration. I have washed, sorted, braided, and even hand-dyed horse hair. I make necklaces and bracelets with lengths of braids, and I make tassels and other ornamental objects with tufts of unbraided hair. Most of this work is memorial in nature, adornments designed to honor the memory of horses who have left this world. Occasionally I have the pleasure to make something with hair from a horse who is still here, and even better I have had the lovely opportunity to make something with hair from a horse (or a mule, I'm delighted to add) who is around and who I know personally.


There is a history of sentimental and memorial adornments made with human hair, too. Examples exist in museum collections of nineteenth and early twentieth century gentlemen's watch fobs, embellished with lovingly woven locks of hair, presumably as a symbol of love and betrothal. Lockets were often filled with wisps of hair from a lover far away to keep them close, or from a baby or child as a memento of a life lost or at least of a childhood gone by.


Hair comes to mind for other reasons, too. In these days of rampant cancers, most of us know someone who has endured chemo or radiation-induced hair loss. It seems a distressingly common thing. One can hardly go out to a large public place without noting women wearing scarfs or other sorts of head coverings over obviously bare heads. Some do it with panache, others are clearly self-conscious. Wigs are even harder to wear convincingly, so bolder souls throw all pretense to the wind and opt for an outrageous color or style. And some venture out with their bald heads for all to see, challenging themselves and everyone else to respond honestly and authentically. A bald head can not be ignored. It will not go quietly away to let us pretend cancer isn't ripping apart the fabric of many, many lives. 


Once again, hair, and the lack of it, is highly symbolic. It can be the symbol of hope and recovery, when hair grows back after successful treatment... or its loss can be one of a series of heart-breaking losses that precede the final loss - of a life.


I have mentioned my dear friend who is living with advanced breast cancer. She is on my mind as I think about hair because she recently endured full-head radiation that has left her with no hair. She was told it won't grow back. Which, damn it, is really a moot point: she has also been told her time is short. In a fit of sorrow and regret, I think maybe I should have made something beautiful with some of her hair before it was gone... something to remember her by. Then I smile a little and think of all the ways she has been a dear friend, all the ways she has filled me with her kindness, compassion, humor and creativity. And I know that hair is not the thing I will carry in my heart in memory of her when she leaves this world. 


Hair is very symbolic, but the symbol is not the thing...

Beast of Burden, Part 2

Donkeys are the archetypal beast of burden. All around the world they are seen as pack animals put on the earth to carry stuff around for humans... and, in spite of their collective reputation for stubbornness they have carried burdens since long before Mary rode one to Bethlehem, and they continue to do so in countless towns and villages, in the rustic countryside and the mountains. 

The little donkey pictured here, that I hand sewed of wool felt, yarn and embroidery thread, is a different kind of donkey made to carry a different kind of burden.

A dear friend, the one I have mentioned previously, has been traveling the hard road of breast cancer for a couple of years now, and the path has become increasingly difficult as the cancer finds ways to disguise itself, invading various parts of my friend's body and eluding eradication. Her burdens increase by the day. And her burdens will, her doctors say, become unbearably heavy unbearably soon... 

This little donkey was created as a humble gift to symbolize the help that a friend can provide: the act of sharing a burden, through words and actions, and through a willingness to accompany a friend along a too-short, too-hard road. 

   

Spring is Bitter/Sweet

The moon of spring waxes full, and round-bellied mares, feeling the lengthening daylight hours and the pull of the tides, bring forth their foals.

But spring is bitter/sweet.

At a friend's barn, a mare gives birth to a beautiful, healthy foal, gives her the precious colostrum-laden first milk, and then the mare falls to the ground, dead. Meanwhile, just a few miles away at the barn of a friend of this friend, a mare loses its newborn foal. Humans intervene to try to bring this mare and the orphaned foal together. If all goes well, these strangers will help each other to move forward in a patchwork of loss and need, of longing and fulfillment.

Spring, if you buy into the perennial hype of retailers and marketeers, is an orgy of joy and newness, of all things green and growing. All for your purchasing pleasure. But spring has its own price. There must be a balance, and the shadow of spring is sacrifice and surrender. Mother Nature invented recycling.

But spring is bitter/sweet. 

The full moon of spring brings an abundance of roadkill and tree frog songs. I get a phone call. A dear friend's cancer has returned with a vengeance. Though spring's promise of renewal feels hollow, hope for a miracle could take root in the fertile, dark earth of this, the  bitter/sweet season... 

I want to go to see my horse and breathe in her sweet, warm living fragrance.