On Sunday about half of our group got ordained as monks and nuns for the week. The night before, I stood outside the Buddha Hall with the other laypeople and took pictures as the soon-to-be-monastics had their heads shaved.
People sometimes say how photography takes you out of the moment. You’re trying too hard to remember it to experience it. This wasn’t like that though. While I was taking pictures, I really saw everyone’s face. I had no disinclination from looking very, very closely. After I’d taken each shot, I scrutinized the frame before getting ready to take another. I could see the details of individual moments very soon after they occurred, see the process each person went through as his or her hair disappeared. There was solemnity and fear and wonder. I could see all the strange ways the hair moved across their faces as it fell. I could see the caring hands of the monks and nuns as they touched the newly bald spots and sprinkled them with water. With my camera I could remember slowly. I did not meld it all into one memory in my head.
In the middle of it, I stopped taking pictures so that I could help hold the cloth to catch the hair. As Sister Molini began to shave, she chanted softly and tunefully and the three of us (two girls holding the cloth, one getting her head shaved) repeated. When the chant was over, she leaned forward and whispered to the soon-to-be-nun that her hair was beautiful and lovely and that the loss of it was a kind of death.
I’ve never seen anything like that before.
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