To everything there is a season.
I’m driving today. The road races by, cold with the oncoming winter. The trees, skeletal without their leaves, look dead. The fields are frozen, shorn of their fruits long ago. Picturesque. But even from within the heat of the car, the sight of it all makes me shiver.
The seasons make us. They mete out our minutes of sunlight and degrees of warmth and millimeters of rain. Not with a parent’s loving tenderness, or even a teacher’s careful pedagogy, but with a metronome’s mindless repetition. And today they have made the world outside this car cold, and still, and dead.
But you are not bound by their rhythm! You are vibrant, and alive, and your own self. What the seasons decree must be a cold and barren time you can make into growth and flourishing life. Hooray for you, that have this freedom and this power to make your world better than it was before!
To shave is to suppress. So much suppression infuses what we do that, hoodwinked by fashion, we become our own gaolers. We shave ourselves. And as the seasons swirl around us to make us cold, to make us withdraw, in that moment, friends, I say that we should fight back against their mindless cruelty.
One month of the year I will not go gently into my cell. One month of the year I will make, upon my person, rebellion against desolation around me. One month, this month, I will be as beautiful as I am able. I will take no blade against myself, I will not lessen me. And I invite you. I entreat you. From the cold of this frozen highway I beg you to do the very same.
meandering wildly 