Last Monday morning, 16th of March, 9am, there was a programme on Radio 4 that included these words that I have only just looked at a few days after I listened to that programme and told myself I wanted to write about some stuff about it as it resonated and reverberated within me and my vibes around how women be women in a men dominated world… and human faces as identity… and how consciousness shows up all around, beyond and within us.
Here are some of those words that I have just seen in the Radio 4 written blurb in their summary;
Sweeping into consciousness… sense of self… experienced… human face… social status… decades of love… betrayal… understand the choices… plant biology… shaped her… deeper self… in the modern world… learns, slowly… about awareness… to claim.
I am tempted… had been thinking… that I would go back to that radio programme and check it again and make notes and write something like a proper essay… like the kinda thing they ask you do in school or college or uni… when they then give you feedback and a mark… and if they don’t think it’s up to scratch… then they warn you to do better or fail… or something.
Now sitting here in my front room and having checked and shared some of the words in the Radio 4 blurb… I realise that these three things, consciousness, women, faces, are all things that have occupied a massive part of my thinking, living, loving, curiousity, focus, confusion and understanding of what it is to human, to be me and how all of that and this wraps around into my drive to extract parts of me from the cultural conditioning and see what is left when the weight and limits of that conditioning is at least challenged and at best left behind like the skin of a snake after shedding and moving on.
Where do I start?
Well, I was born from my Mother, so knew her before I knew anyone else.
Even before I was out of her womb I knew so much about her, and that only expanded once I was out and in her arms for those first few years.
And then later onwards, several more years, I watched my partner, get pregnant a few times, birth four daughters, and those daughters all still share parts of their lives with me, so do my two grand daughters, (as does my grandson, and as this bit is about the women…).
So yeah, the women in my life, before I came out of the womb, and since, have had a big impact on me and my understanding of the limits of this world we share, and the possibility to stretch and break through some, many, of those conditioned responses that only reduce me/us and offer only pain and separation.
Next… could be either consciousness or faces… somehow they are connected for me, but lets go with faces if only because I learned to understand them before I understood what consciousness was in any literal way.
When I went to the barbers every few weeks there was something about just watching him (Alex), look at the people sitting in the chair as he cut their hair.
I can’t say I thought that through, but the gradual movement of his scissors and the clippers reshaped the way the head and the face showed up, and I think that kinda caught my attention. It was like… nope… I can’t word it or access it… and will just go with I didn’t mind going to the barbers and sitting to wait for my haircut, there was stuff there that drew me in.
Never made that barbers link with me becoming a junior in a smart, trendy hairdressers in the centre of Manchester when I was 16 in 1972. Probably because the salon was such a different world to the barbers.
Regardless, from June 26th 1972 my job involved having to pay lots of attention to the faces of everyone who came through that salon door.
I was encouraged to look at the whole person by the hairdressers in the salon who helped train me. What shoes were they wearing, how did they move, what did they do as they walked in the door, how did they sit in the chair, what were they doing with their hands as they described the way they wanted their hair to be, what was their smile like, their jaw line, their eyes, not just in the physical appearance, more in their energy, and, did they smile or not?
So many people were nervous back then walking into a modern, trendy, smart as fuck hairdressing salon, it was part of a new world arriving and opening up for many of us, me included. And some people still find going for a haircut scary.
All of that paying close attention to who ever walked in was the information I had to notice and gather and convert feeding into the big decisions that I would make many times each day as I learned to become a hairdresser.
The research was to look at people closely, and then check with them to make sure I understood what they wanted, and what they needed, (which was not always the same thing), and then create something that worked for us both.
It was no effort for me to look at peoples’ faces, they had always fascinated me, the people and their faces.
I can remember sitting in church as a kid and looking at the fixed expressions on the faces of the people there and how, for the old people, there was so much of their lives showing in their resting facial expression.
And I also recall thinking that the tension and disapproval that so many of the older faces showed must have had something to do with a life of wars, difficulty, and really hard work.
I didn’t think in these kinds of words that I am sharing here, then, as a kid, it was more body stuff for me, or more somatic as I’d say now, those feelings I noticed while hearing the church talk of love and forgiveness and turning the other cheek and all that, compared to the lives of those I was surround by in my small world of the 1960s and early 70’s Salford… and the reality of life for a working class woman born in the early 19 hundreds… never slotted together with us youngsters easily.
Their faces didn’t tell the tales of love and forgiveness and turning the other cheek, I mean, there were exceptions… but… you know, come on… there were many more tight lips and much scowling and tutting going on in the world I grew up in.
And, no judgement here from me mind, many of them had seen their way through two big wars that took their fathers and brothers and possibly their sons too. The singing and dancing and joys and jubilations may have been what was shown at the cinemas… any way, I guess you get my drift here… and I hadn’t realised this stuff was still in my here and now, until I started recalling and writing it today.
And this, that, accidentally, leads me into consciousness, I am conscious of the memories I have of the people around me as a child, and an adult, and alongside this, conscious of how much love and time I have invested into understanding, admiring, noticing and enjoying the massive diversity of faces there are to be seen in any life.
So, where am I now… oh yeah… done women… faces… now something to do with consciousness and the ways it shapes our sense of identity… and how other non human organisms experience and use consciousness as well, because they do.
Plants… for example… let’s maybe leave that here for now… and if that draws you in and you can’t wait… just search plants and consciousness and sentience.
The identity thing, as in I know who I am… I am this old guy sitting in a chair and writing something using a laptop and my fingers and creating something that maybe others might come across and somehow make guesses around who I am and what I am like. And that could be you… and even if this is the first time you have bumped into me and my stuff… you may well already have an idea of who I am and what I am like.
What is it about my own being conscious of who I am and how I feel that I can change the ways I stand, talk, look, move, and behave and then when I meet new people, they may think I am very different from the ways my oldest friends see and understand me?
My head is starting to spin now, am I the person I want to be, and/or, am I the person I want others to think I am, or think they want me to be… and/or, maybe, I am an ever changing fluid flowing while I am living in response to so many inputs as they show up, and that may be beyond my cognitive capacity to know that? WTF? Totally lost now and at least conscious of this, that.
Had a break, let my mind and body settle, closed my eyes for several minutes, and then went back to check what I had heard in the radio programme that energised me and fuelled me to write this… and now recognising I have been dancing round that but not getting there.
So, these are some of the words that I have just heard, scribbled them down, and not necessarily a word for word rendition;
Towards wholeness, integrates the shadow side… which we project onto others… making the other the enemy.
Moving to, one character that is more conscious than another… there are degrees of consciousness… there are people working very hard to be less conscious… and… I could be more conscious than I am.
From there… Why aren’t I?
Her relationship with both the men, even all the men in her life, including her father… are men who are not reflective… none of them… and all that plays a part in her growing consciousness… and we have to talk about gender… the desire in me or the deceit in me… who owns my body and who has power over it… that sense of the dissolving of the self… Albert Camus and Carl Jung… and… we have to talk about gender.
And around there I dipped out again and decided to go with this for now… consciousness is not a thing of words… or not only a thing of words but more… maybe much more a thing of the body.
In nearly all the work I have done, cutting hair, working with soils and their living organic self determinism, working as a facilitator… as a somatic coach… there are moments where the person or the situations I am working with, looks at me or responds to me in a way that, to me, shares something of… oh yeah, there are other perspectives, other options, other understandings, other choices that although they are yet hard to point in a specific direction, open up towards uncertainties that I am prepared to go along with, rather than to stay within this certainty that the current position does not hold, nurture or open me, and never will.
Those many moments when I have been gifted the others expressions… of… self revealed confidence and knowings… leaves me here smiling… and all the while trusting that this moment will pass and more will show up, as long as I can offer my attention, and allow others to trust they can safely share what they have previously hidden from themselves, for fear of being blamed, shamed, rejected and excluded… while knowing that I am just there, here, regardless.
When I can trust the soils to do what they need to do to create the most long term stable and diverse ecosystems, because those are the most generative and generous ones, and not interfere, then I can feel safe in the support that this planet has to offer me and all of us.
This planet that so many of us have called Mother, and all our faces grow from her, leaving us with a conscious knowing that she is always there and if she goes we all go… this planet is conscious.
I have no idea that… I have no idea… I have no… I have… I have a planet, and that will always do for now.
Thanks for jumping into this semi madness and swimming in these muddy waters alongside me… I am not sure why I need to feel that this writing needs sharing beyond my own knowing of… but there we go… known, understood, unnerved, unearthed and still smiling together.
Pic via an old Pentax auto 110 slr late seventies or early eighties. Taken late one night when the light was making me feel…