Extradimensional hair care
Nothing lasts. There is a graveyard where everything I am talking about is, now I stood there once, on the green grass, scattering flowers. … Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no. Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also, like the diligent leaves. A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.Excerpts from Mary Oliver’s Flare
If my heart is a safe, Mary Oliver’s verses are the instruments of a master lock picker; a stethoscope that listens for every click and precision tools that fit right in the tumblers. I’m not sure you should do this to a poem by the way - excerpting sections out of the whole. If you have time, look up the entire thing. You have time! I arrived late to the Mary Oliver party, by way of a surf edit of all things. Call me basic or uninformed that I hadn’t found my place in the family of things until my early 40s1. To miss the party altogether would have been such a tragedy. I hope you make your way there too.
Leave no trace. I was brought up on this mantra, but it should be obvious to the least attentive observer that we are too late by a long shot. This was never our lot, nor even a natural goal. There’s always more than a trace left by us. Sometimes I’d rather we indoctrinated instead toward leaving traces intentionally, but harmonious ones that respect the natural world while acknowledging and even celebrating our place in it.
This contemplation on trace and place in nature forms in the shower as I am reading the label on my shampoo bottle. I’m trying a low-impact, cruelty-free kind (a hallmark of our species that, even for simple hair care products, freedom from cruelty is exceptional enough to bear mentioning). The label says 93% naturally derived. At this I catch myself laughing out loud - the preposterousness of supposing 7% of my shampoo could be derived from something other than nature. It strikes me as a claim too absurd to ignore. There in the shower I roundly reject it with whatever scientific authority I possess, which is none. But the joke occurs to me spontaneously that there is a parallel universe where I am a respected theoretical physicist. Another little laugh. Pretty bad, right? Borrowing authority from parallel-me, I assert that there is no physics esoteric enough to support this idea of unnatural ingredients.
I am left only with fantasy as a space where I might find a portal through which that non-naturally derived fraction of my shampoo might have leapt. I’d love to believe I’m lathering my thinning hair with something so magical - no doubt the effects would be a more lustrous mane, and maybe access to intergalactic teletransport besides - but I’m afraid if its a constituent of this bottle, or of any other container in the knowable universe, its bound to be of nature. As are we and our containers and all else seen, felt, and fit to be listed on a label or otherwise considered in this world.
Turning over these ideas, I slump seated facing the torrent of raining hot water. Under rising steam the surface of the shower floor feels strangely cool on my skin. Tiny rainbow suds gather and foam behind my ears. Thin runnels form at my temples, converge along my brow and course down the bridge of my nose. Water collects there to form fat drops one after another plopping onto my lower lip, a faint tangy taste of soap prickling on my tongue. Water runs all down my face under my eyes over my cheeks cascading from my chin to my lap splashing onto the shower pan whirling and sucking through the grill down into the pipes and gone forever. Carrying away those traces of magical shampoo and the dust and oil it stripped off of me.
While educating myself on the mechanics of posting to substack, the search engine with unsolicited help from AI assist tells me that articles are basically pointless without a call to action. Well ok, I am tempted to go on here about what exactly I think we ought to do in nature instead of leaving no trace. I have been accused though of lobbing judgements too casually and am sensitive to being seen as overly opinionated. Admittedly I do hold strangely concise convictions about proper attitudes and behaviors in situations ranging from airport security lines to wilderness places. In that way I realize I’m like Larry David crossed with Henry David Thoreau and am apparently sometimes equally insufferable.2
But as we are all of nature (the earth is our country) I believe we must already know intrinsically what we ought to do and have only to do it. I doubt I can add much by formulating a lecture to anyone else on the subject. Instead this morning I think on the traces I do leave in this world and in the worlds of my kith. I’m afraid I notice these traces are at times unnatural after all. Unnaturally cruel, unnaturally demanding. These parts of my nature, or my un-nature as it were; do they come from that sinister extradimension where the shampoo factory sources its unnatural ingredients too? Are they the same components that give freshly-washed locks that dewy sheen?
I detest this part of me as much as I can anything; the 7% or even just 0.7% fraction unnatural meanness.3 Its a hopeful project I’m undertaking though. In scrounging around for the traces of myself I don’t care to leave, I hope to bag them up a little at a time and send them packing back through that fantastical portal for unnatural derivatives. If you find any similar rubbish in the wilderness of yourself, feel free to throw it in there too.
Why not leave a trace while you are in the neighborhood?
Also, as I clearly have no editor, feel free to send me your notes, cruel or cruelty-free!
Finally… same cat, different tree:
Or call me “middlebrow” (as she has been called) for being such a fanboy. But read Henry Oliver (no relation?) on the subject first, and then never use the term middlebrow again.
Enough about me? Stop here!
Please recognize that squirmy excessive self-disclosure is as essential to the myfeelings vibe as self-conscious footnoting and metaphors stretched past their breaking point.