{"id":366,"date":"2011-01-11T21:08:10","date_gmt":"2011-01-12T02:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katrinakenison.com\/?p=366"},"modified":"2011-01-11T21:08:10","modified_gmt":"2011-01-12T02:08:10","slug":"pierced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/pierced\/","title":{"rendered":"Pierced!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I love earrings.\u00a0 But the idea of anything puncturing, piercing, or poking my body makes me queasy.\u00a0 I first tried getting my ears pierced in college, fortified by two glasses of wine and my friends\u2019 assurance that this was \u201cnothing.\u201d Two months later, and I was still creeped out every time I had to work a stud through the flesh of my ear lobe.\u00a0 One night, preparing to go out, I stood in the bathroom, teeth clenched, sweat beading out all over my body, and began the dreaded ritual of putting on my earrings.\u00a0 The next thing I knew, I was down on the cold tile floor, coming out of a dead faint.<\/p>\n

That was it for me.\u00a0 Fear shaped my style: I decided that I would buy funky old vintage clip-ons and stake out my own un-pierced territory somewhere to the far right of fashion. Needless to say, the thought of a tattoo was never entertained.<\/p>\n

Flash forward thirty years. I am no longer a young person making some sort of retro statement with her clunky old-lady earrings.\u00a0 I\u2019m just an old lady wearing clunky old-lady earrings.\u00a0 Earrings, by the way, that pinch and hurt.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure where the idea came from, but I suddenly blurted out to a friend on the phone the other night that I was thinking of getting my ears pierced.\u00a0 (Until that moment, I hadn\u2019t even known that I was.)\u00a0 She was all over it.\u00a0 \u201cTomorrow?\u201d she asked.\u00a0 And then, before I could back down, \u201cI\u2019ll find out where you should go.\u00a0 And I\u2019ll meet you and hold your hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so it was that at 4:30 yesterday afternoon, I was at Claire\u2019s, where I had never been, in the mall, where I never go, watching a freckle-faced nine-year-old girl squinch up her eyes and hold steady while a young woman popped a couple of sterile studs into her ears.\u00a0 \u201cIt didn\u2019t hurt at all,\u201d she assured me when it was over.<\/p>\n

I reminded my friend Debbie that I\u2019d tried this once before, and hadn\u2019t had the stomach for it.\u00a0 \u201cYeah,\u201d she shot back, \u201cbut that was before childbirth.\u00a0 You can handle this now.\u201d\u00a0 She pulled a little white box out of her purse.\u00a0 \u201cThese are your inspiration,\u201d she said, and opened it to reveal a beautiful pair of dangling handmade drops fashioned of resin and silver and gold, utterly unlike anything I\u2019ve ever owned.<\/p>\n

Debbie approved the placement of two purple dots on my ears.\u00a0 She held both my hands in hers, and in less than a minute, it was done.\u00a0 No big deal.<\/p>\n

If I\u2019ve set an intention for 2011, it is simply this:\u00a0 Feel the fear, and do it anyway.\u00a0 I want to step up to the plate, take a swing, and make contact with my own life.\u00a0 \u201cWe are what we repeatedly do,\u201d my yoga teacher said this morning.\u00a0 So often, my own instinct is to hesitate, to hold back, to defer,\u00a0 stopped\u00a0 by some vague sense of not quite having what it takes to do whatever it is I dream of doing.\u00a0 But the ups and downs of mid-life are teaching me something about the nature of dreams and the half-life of possibilities.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have forever to get this right.\u00a0 But we do have right now; we are offered the infinite possibilities of this very moment — a moment that will never come again.\u00a0 \u201cDon\u2019t let your throat tighten with fear,\u201d began this morning\u2019s Rumi poem. \u201cTake sips of breath all day and all night, before death closes your mouth.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s so easy, so tempting, to repeat old patterns, to cling to what I know.\u00a0 But why not take a sip of breath and begin to move, ever so quietly, into new ways of being, new ways of thinking, new ways of doing?\u00a0 I realize, of course, that getting my ears pierced at age 52 is no big deal.\u00a0 Yet, saying \u201cyes\u201d to this small desire, after shrinking away from it for thirty years, feels, well, kind of symbolic to me.\u00a0 \u00a0 And my tiny diamond studs are a secret reminder:\u00a0 I don\u2019t have to be who I\u2019ve always been, or stay afraid of the things that have always scared me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love earrings.\u00a0 But the idea of anything puncturing, piercing, or poking my body makes me queasy.\u00a0 I first tried getting my ears pierced in college, fortified by two glasses of wine and my friends\u2019 assurance that this was \u201cnothing.\u201d Two months later, and I was still creeped out every time I had to work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,26,29,39,14],"tags":[229],"class_list":{"0":"post-366","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-courage","8":"category-faith","9":"category-friendship","10":"category-midlife","11":"category-soul-work","12":"tag-intention","13":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/600x600.png?fit=600%2C600","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}