I had been getting haircuts all my life but they didn't seem very important. My father used to call getting a haircut "getting his ears lowered" after the visual effect. The only serious difference between one haircut and another in my life was whether the cut was a crewcut or not. The first time I ever got my hair cut very short, the style was called a "wiffle" by those I knew. In wrestling and many other sports, having very short hair usually means it is not a bother to take care of and is easily kept in place and clean.
But I understand that getting one's hair cut off can be a very big marker in one's life.
From "Hand Wash Cold"
Earlier, I'd told my daughter about my decision and she did not react. It would take the actual experience, the real event, to trigger a response from her. I told myself she could handle it. My husband recoiled at my news, clamped shut in his private loss. On the stretch of rug between our closeted wardrobes, beside the double vanity, below the range of our reflections in the mirrored wall, I spoke into the darkening hours about how relieved I was to finally be free. His shoulders lurched and the sobs came in heaves. He was losing the wife he thought he had — the look, the picture, the package — and I knew his pain as my own. I fell silent, the words incomplete, and reached for him across the space in between, where at long last I found love.
This was not the end of a marriage. This was the beginning of a buzz cut. When I first began my Zen practice, I was finicky about my hair. I had it cut and styled expensively highlighted religiously and I blow-dried it into brittle submission before I bade the world hello. Every day I scrutinized my tenderized pate for shine, bounce, and fullness, and nearly always found it lacking. I was still knotted in my topmost obsession when I began hanging out with shaven-headed monks at rustic mountain retreats. While they were contemplating nonattachment, I was wondering where the devil to plug in my 1,750-watt Conair. Deep below the scalp, I must have known where my head was headed. One night in a dream, I lifted up a silky tress and exposed what was hidden below: a bald knob as barren as a bowling ball. The vision haunted me, and I switched to a volumizing shampoo. When we first married, my husband was finicky about my practice. He worried about what went on under the blanket of meditative silence for days and nights on end when like-minded devotees conjoined in bliss. He told me his nightmare: that I'd saunter off on one too many retreats and disappear for good. Every bit of it came true, just not in the way you might think. Zen was the end of me, in one sense, and the beginning of everyone and everything else. When I committed myself to the priesthood, I didn't lose my family or my home life. I'm still here. I lost only my carefully constructed self-image, which was falling apart.
