#21 Grow Bushy Beards
May 3rd, 2008 by doing better
This advice can apply to men, but mostly it is meant for women – at least, for those who are capable of the feat. Not many women can grow substantial beards, or will admit to the ability, though we have seen some good ones in rural Italy.
Our main aim with these beards is not to look disgusting but to attain the rank of crone. Once we have become crones, we can forget about all the annoying people in the world. We have paid our dues. We have risen above them. Mostly they ignore us, and occasionally they pity us when they happen to look down and see us with our bent backs and hunched shoulders, going about our business under their noses. We are too busy to pity them. We ignore them, too, and get on with our work.
What do we do when we are bearded crones, looking down from the heights of wisdom on the young whippersnappers running around, chasing their silly nonsense? We may throw them a few tidbits of wisdom – not that they will pay any attention – but mostly we are absorbed in our arcane pursuits.
Do not calls us witches. We are alchemists of the spirit. The demons of change are our familiars. We know what it is to be transformed beyond all recognition, yet remain the same.
We see patterns in the world that other people cannot see because they do not have the breadth and depth of our experience. We see a cloud of gnats hovering in the sunlight in our garden. The gnats do not know that they are a cloud in our garden. They know only their own trajectories in the cloud, the furious turns, the proximities and distances from those gnats they loathe and desire. They do not know that tomorrow they will die, that they will awake unable to lift their wings, bled of today’s frenzied energy. We know because we have seen it before. We have seen everything before.
We see the tracks our fellows make around us; we watch them on their journeys; we see long before they do where they will end up. We behold the weaving of the world. We may spare them a kind word because they are so unknowing, but mostly we have little patience with their foolishness.
The men of our age, loving power, have gone into politics and foolishly shaved their faces (except Fidel Castro). They fritter away their energy moving their chess pieces around the board, but they are all pawns, and they are blind. They think they can direct the world, but they cannot see where they are going. They cannot see the forest for the trees.
If only they could sink back into their beard, that forest of wisdom which sustains us and transforms us into the guardians of the world.