Living Rootless: July 2025

I ventured into threading again while in Tucson. Ouch.

In my search for past posts that touched on waxing, threading, plucking, or razoring, I uncovered one from 2014, in which a stranger in Louisiana uttered this proposition to me:

"I'd really like to wax your car."

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Rootless Brow - zing

The other day, I had my brows waxed. While I lay on the table, I remembered other such times.

In Awassa, Ethiopia, two men at a salon threaded my brows. After my brows got cleaned up, I continued my walk "home," and saw:

... there were 15 giant storks. Huge. One alighted, then disgorged food into the mouths of two gangly "teenagers." I watched, agog. A short walk further, directly before me, another tree filled with storks. Walking underneath (glad I had my hat on), I looked up and counted more than 10 oversize nests. As with the Bale Mountain forest, this was the stuff of medieval fairy tales.

Around the corner-ish from my temporary digs in Istanbul, I got my whole face threaded. Amazing how that works, cause you wouldn't think it would.

In 2010, on a road trip with my mother, I had my face cleaned up in a Walmart in Canyon City, Texas.

In Rustavi, Georgia, there were a couple of rugged waxings at a local salon. Yeow. But speaking of Caucasus Georgia, the Georgian women have spectacular brows.

Here's one woman's experience getting her brows done in Nice (waxed) and Palestine (tweezed).

Mala beads from lotus seeds. Attribution: SecretLondon on wikicommons.

As I explored how meditation / mindfulness could flow into my daily life, I remembered my maternal grandmother, who prayed with her rosary.

In its explanation of how to pray the rosary, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops includes this:

The repetition in the Rosary is meant to lead one into restful and contemplative prayer related to each Mystery. The gentle repetition of the words helps us to enter into the silence of our hearts, where Christ's spirit dwells. The Rosary can be said privately or with a group.

I'm agnostic, but the value of "entering into the silence of our hearts" resonates.

While on this mental journey, my road journey put me alongside two women who create jewelry with beads. One woman I already knew; the second was a woman I met in an Alaskan airbnb. The former was a colleague from my time in Caucasus Georgia - following our tenure there, she traveled to Ghana to learn about beads in jewelry-making. The latter has created jewelry with trade beads for decades.

Thus the natural turn of study onto the use of beads in a meditation practice.

I paused my draft of this post to poke through my cache of broken jewelry pieces for beads that I might fashion into a circle for meditation. I discovered I do have the beginnings of something. I am enthusiastic about what I will create.