February 9
We are nature
No two one of us are alike. We’ve all grown up with different aesthetics, different expectations, different pressures, and different anxieties.
I grew up in a whole different era. I was made to feel embarrassed about having fine limp hair in the era of the bouffant hairdo. My hair was teased, coloured, sprayed, gelled and filled with mousse to increase its volume and help move me as far away from ‘mouse’ as possible.
I worried about the chemicals being poured onto my head, but my deep insecurities around having fine limp mousy hair worried me even more.
A rapidly changing world challenges all of us.
I’m quick to pull out the adage ‘it’s only one plastic bag said 8 billion people’ when it’s something I’m prepared to tackle. When I don’t want, or am too afraid, to let go of something, however, I turn a blind eye to it and hear myself rationalising that, in the grand scheme of things, what difference would this one little change make in the face of the rest of the world’s mass consumption.
Little actions, and changes in our consumption, however, aren’t just ‘micro-consumerist bollocks’, as George Monbiot has declared.
They’re about addressing core beliefs that have allowed us to endanger life on earth for trivial or artificial illusions. They’re about remembering that WE ARE NATURE and that anything we do to damage the natural world, ultimately damages all life, including us.
My insecurities reflect that very early on in life I lost sight of nature’s beauty which doesn’t need to be artificially teased, and coloured and filled with volumizing mousse.
We can’t unravel all the trappings of our artificial worlds overnight, but we can try to understand the beliefs that have created this world we’ve become part of, and how we’re being manipulated to not see our own natural beauty.
So, today, I stopped turning a blind eye and finally, after many decades, stopped using hair mousse.
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