Let Down Your Hair!
How Cross-Pollination Helps Everybody Bloom
You know the line—Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your hair! It’s one of the most famous in the realm of fairy tales. So famous, we may not actually remember much else about the story, which is true in my case. I’m not even sure when I first heard it, but the line stuck, even though the circumstanced didn’t.
In modern times, at least from the 1960s on, I guess, it comes with a twist—Let your hair down, as in let loose, get wild. Something I have not been doing lately.
For years, this time of the year, about mid-August through the middle of September, I would go feral. Summer in New England was short and I made the most of the long summer days, outdoors on my bike from dawn to dusk, and usually well into the night. There were bonfires on the beach, dancing, shooting stars, and lightning far out to sea. Mid-August, when the light shifted and the dune shadows grew longer so there was an only an hour or two in full sun on the beach, we all knew would bring an end to our halcyon days. The kingfisher would fly south and the snowy owl would descend upon the island like a merciless God who sent storms to tear shingles off our roofs and rattle the windowpanes.
As the light dimmed and the air grew nippy, the urge to grab every minute of intensity I could coursed through me like bottled lightning. I danced as hard as I could because the bands would all go back to the mainland soon. I dove into waves so cold nobody in Hawai’i would consider going in without a wetsuit, because there were months ahead where swimming would be impossible.
Even after five years in Hawai’i, my body is still attuned to that rhythm. I miss it. To be honest, summer in Hawai’i is flat like the ocean, which makes for good diving, but I’ve been bored. I’m embarrassed to admit that paradise bores me, but it does. I long for some good trouble, a challenge from a snake, the threat of a hurricane, or even just the buzz of gossip wondering if the hurricane is going to hit us or not. Where I live at the moment, it rains every afternoon and the yard smells like rotten mangoes. Mold is ever-present—noun, verb, and adjective, and my best buddy is a spider who wove her web above my outdoor desk months ago.
I don’t want to write to you from a place where I’m bored—with myself or with my writing—so this week I decided to try something different. I didn’t know I was calling up to a window in a tower with no door for someone to let their hair down. Nobody heard me anyway. So I let it down myself, a golden wave long enough to pull myself up hand over hand to reach that open window..
For years before I moved to Hawai’i, I attended the Great Mother Conference, founded by American poet and mythopoetic pioneer, Robert Bly. He believed artists should fertilize their work by cross-pollinating with other disciplines. At the Conference, poets, scholars, and Jungian analysts, found themselves Sufi dancing, making masks out of paper maché, drumming, and writing to ecstatic ragas played on the sitar and tabla. This may not seem out of the norm these days to members of the New Age spiritual community, but at the time it was revolutionary in American culture, especially amongst the serious poets who gravitated to Bly’s scene. There was no way I would have ever ended up in a Sufi zikr when I went to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, or slept communally on a barn floor to be awoken by Ruth Bly, Robert’s wife, asking me if I had a dream I wanted her to record which she shared with us in the morning.
So in the spirit of a community I miss, I sat down yesterday and illustrated the old German tale, Rapunzel. Six hours of sketching to PJ Harvey and a total mess of spilled ink later, I had these drawings, the testament to a delightful afternoon of utter absorption in something for pure enjoyment. I didn’t even plan to show them here in the Corpus Callosum Chronicles.
However, once they were all done and lined up on my lanai, I realized how much I liked them. I kind of wanted to show them off. I also thought the story of how they came to be might be inspiring to “serious” artists who may feel in a rut, or so hyper-focused on perfection they forget the joy of creating for fun.
Creating is fun, but I had forgotten that. I was the one who was boring. I know these drawings are nowhere near the quality of what I can achieve with words, but sometimes I think that’s not really what’s important at all. What if the most important contribution in making art of any kind is the feeling you have while you make it, not the work of art itself? My spider friend’s web extends far beyond the limits of what she’s woven.
Please enjoy my audio telling of Rapunzel. I even badly strumming my new guitar and croon a little for you, something I’ve long wanted to do. I may sound terrible, but I don’t care. I may never learn more than three chords, but I don’t care. I enjoyed made myself in the making. I hope you do, too. Enjoy yourself. Let your hair down.
I’m not going to offer much commentary in the story aside from saying that I think the story has a lot to say about how the hero inside each one of us must be tempered by loss in order to learn how to act from the heart, not the ego, and of how this can only happen when we’ve established an unshakeable sense of safety through the completion of grief. I’d love to hear where you find yourself in the story through an image. Please feed the story and all of us with that moment in the comments. Drawings follow the audio.
Listen to Rapunzel Here
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
Love this post and the fact that you let yourself do something Creative just for the FUN of it... also, the paintings themselves really speak to me. I have a serious connection with the story of Rapunzel (my story is basically the 20th century version lol) and the contrast of dark and light is really stunning. Also, I'm in Hawaii too! Which island are you on? I found you from Ke'oni's legacy ceremony so would love to connect! 🩷🌺
That was so nourishing, thank you! Loved the vulnerable authenticity of your share. It reminded me of a couple of other hair traditions. There is a week in Russia each spring when they celebrate Mermaids, seriously! It's called Rusalka week. The young people go from house to house throwing water on each other to see if anyone is actually a mermaid. Presumably, water is the magic element that turns them back into their true selves. Mermaids are REAL in Russia and are known to live in the forests in and around fresh water ponds and lakes.
Unlike tame maidens who wear their hair in one tidy braid down their back, and unlike the wives whose braid is split in two during the traditional marriage ceremony and tied up under a handkerchief (never to be seen again), mermaids wear their hair down and wild. They are not tamed by man, are living outside of society as sovereigns in nature.
In villages, a maiden (bride to be) on her way to the wedding will begin by wearing her hair down and free. She sings a lament all the way to the church about how she is now going to give up her freedom, her beauty and the joy of her sisterhood. Her bridesmaids weave her hair into the one braid down her back all the way to the wedding showing the bride's "choice" to abide by the structure and expectations of being a tame maiden fit to become a wife in Christian matrimony.
Women who chose NOT to marry, or those who were not marriable due to lack of virginity, would become mermaids in the woods. Men both feared them and longed for them. Some mermaids ended up in the woods due to sexual orientation, abuse or sexual assault that left them not wanting to marry or unable to marry, so you can guess that stories of mermaids drowning men was not uncommon, a little like the storyline of "Where the Crawdads Sing." The point is, I didn't realize how wearing my down and free sends an archetypal message regarding my own sense of freedom.