My head hurts.  Not the inside of my head.  The outside.  The muscles on top of my skull.  The ligaments.

I sat under a young tree yesterday and leaned my head back and my head was and is tender, so tender.

I swear my skull has changed shape in the past few years- at the very top.  It feels like it has sunken in- or maybe it has always been like that since the top of my skull met a lamp post on my 5th birthday— I didn’t know how to use the kick brake on my new bicycle and I headed straight into the lamp post at the bottom of the hill by the grocery store.

 

I don’t know.

But the indentation feels different.

I’ve lost hair of late- my already thin hair is becoming a whisper at the crown of my skull.  I can chalk it up to menopause, but it feels like something else.

The top of my head is tender, yes, like an open wound.

Like the old crown I wore in my old life (the skin having grown around it) has been ripped away and exposed the dermis.  My crown that sat there for 55 years and is now pried away.  All my old roles stripped away.

And it’s OK.  It’s OK.  Oh my god, it is OK.  All as it should be.

But it is quiet and strange.

And sometimes I scramble around on my knees with blurry eyes and the light so low, searching for the crown, with pieces of old skin still attached… thinking I need to put it back on.

I feel the air brushing against the exposed part of my skull.  Perhaps it is a new fontanelle… for certainly this, this life, my life is all anew.

My parents released like birds.

My kids all grown and flying.

The apartment, my nest, so quiet.

As a woman, as a daughter, as a mother, as a human, I do not want to take this lightly.  To let it pass unnoticed or to try to numb it all away.  This is truly something to PAY ATTENTION too.  To allow the emotions.  The quiet.  To not rush this.  To allow the sacredness.  To know the tap tap on the shoulder by the darkness is creativity daring me now to step into my time.

With breadth, space, grace and humour.

And it is GOOD.  This stunned/stunning graduation.

And what now?  Do I await a new crown?  A stepping into… what?

I feel kind of like that deer in that church, walking around in a silent house, a little lost, a little curious…

Growing.  Not a crown.  But protective horns.  A new cycle.  A new chapter.  Regenerating.