The Face We Wear
I love homework.
Yes, you read that correctly. I love homework. If I could have just done homework in school and never been required to show up for the mind-numbing, pedantic classes, where at best I was bored, I probably would have learned so much more. Instead, due to a combination of being highly sensitive and not yet understanding what that meant for me, I often sat in class feeling trapped. Trapped. Terrified, actually. My eyes were trained on the door while I glanced at the clock, which seemed to be my enemy because it never moved quickly enough. Eventually, we'd be let out of class, only to be bullied, teased, or generally made to feel less than. So yes, if school could have simply sent me the homework, I would have been happy. I would have learned. I would have done the work. I would have loved it.
Which is why it was a little surprising that, at the end of our first gathering at Anam Cara, I was given homework that I really, really didn't want to do.
We were all tired. It had been a full week, and there was a mixture of feelings that came with our first gathering coming to an end. As we sat together, Twobirds began passing around little blue plastic-wrapped squares. I was only half listening as the packages made their way around the room. My attention was divided between whatever Twobirds was saying and trying to figure out what exactly was inside this little blue package. Something about a mask.
When my turn came, I opened it and found white-coated netting that reminded me of the casting material used for a broken bone. I put the package in the back of my journal. I'd get to it later.
And, as someone who loves homework, that should have been my first clue.
Once I returned home to Maine, I began seeing posts from my clan mates. "Caution, the material for the mask makes a terrible mess. Be prepared!" There were photographs of faces covered in the casting material. I began wondering why Twobirds had given us this material when there were so many other options for casting. Like papier-mâché. Okay, that probably would have been messy too.
But before I even attempted the homework myself, I noticed something I couldn't quite explain. I really didn't want to do it. It wasn't simply that I didn't want to make a mess. There was a solid reluctance sitting there. So I did what I often do when something doesn't make sense to me: I researched it. I Googled. I discovered a technique for molding tinfoil over the face and applying the plaster strips to the tinfoil rather than directly to the skin. That seemed much more reasonable. And it mostly worked.
I got a face.
It wasn't as detailed as the ones I'd seen posted by my clan mates, but it was definitely a face. Now I just had to travel with it. How I was going to get through four airports keeping a plaster mask intact didn't seem particularly likely, but apparently that was a problem for another day.
When I arrived back at Anam Cara for our second gathering, my mask resembled a pottery project gone wrong. It was flat. Not completely flat. Just flat enough that the face was no longer really a face. I'd brought additional rolls of plaster with me, just in case.
My clan mates looked at my flattened mask.
"No."
Apparently, I was not going to be allowed to pass this off as my mask.
So I took out my rolls of plaster, cut the strips, retrieved a bowl of water, and coated my face in Vaseline.
"You're not going to do that yourself?"
I shrugged my shoulders.
"We're going to help you."
I wasn't going to argue.
Truthfully, I was perfectly happy to just slap the strips on my face and see what happened. Instead, I sat down, and two lovely souls began wetting the strips and carefully placing them on my face.
All of my reluctance melted away.
It was messy. Water and plaster dripped all over me. I sat there and waited while the plaster hardened around my face. Then, ever so gently, I began working it off, little by little.
And there I was.
My face in plaster.
I hadn't come close to getting a result like this at home.
As we looked at the masks we'd made—some of us had done the homework at home, while others, like me, ended up creating them together at Anam Cara—we began to wonder why the actual making of the masks hadn't been part of the mask-making experience in the first place.
Because something had happened when we made them together.
There was a different kind of connection to the masks.
Maybe it was the mess of it. Maybe it was sitting together while someone carefully placed the wet plaster over your face. Maybe it was the vulnerability of allowing someone else to help create the shape of your own face. Or maybe it was simply that we were doing something together rather than taking the materials home and figuring it out on our own.
Whatever it was, we all felt it.
I put my mask into my room to keep it out of the way and allow it to finish drying—24 hours. And every time I went into my room and looked at my face, I marveled at its likeness to my own.
Like so many aspects of this shamanic journey I've been on, I began to wonder whether my reluctance to create the mask on my own had something to do with seeing myself. Really seeing myself.
Seeing all the components of my face.
The small nose my maternal grandfather had noticed and told my mother not to worry about because I could have it fixed later in life. The eyes that seem large to me. The high cheekbones. The downward slope of my mouth when my face is at rest.
No matter what I believed about my face in its totality, I couldn't escape its individual components now. They were there in front of me, cast in plaster.
I was looking at my own face.
And then, at the end of our week together, came another part of the experience I hadn't anticipated.
We spent an entire night—yes, the entire clan, taking shifts—being with all of these masks. For twelve hours, the masks sat together in a circle, in the dark and in the candlelight. Everyone offered something: a song, a dance, energy from ourselves, our presence. I opened the blinds so the masks could watch the sunrise.
There was something about those faces sitting together through the night that transformed what had started as a messy homework assignment into something much larger.
These weren't simply plaster masks anymore. They had been created by us, with us, and then awakened together.
I came home thinking, What a transformational experience.
And I knew I wanted other people to have the opportunity to experience the creation—and the waking—of their own mask.
With Samhain approaching, and Halloween just around the corner, this felt like the perfect time to offer such an experience.
Masks have a rich history. Across cultures and throughout time, they have represented ancestors, spirits, animals, protectors, healers, and unseen aspects of ourselves. And we still use masks today. Often, we choose a mask because we want it to look like someone—or something—we aren't. We hide behind them. We transform ourselves. We become someone else.
But after sitting with my own face in plaster, I can't help wondering if there is another possibility.
What if, sometimes, the mask isn't meant to hide us at all?
What if it shows us something about ourselves that isn't immediately visible just by looking at our face?
What parts of yourself might appear when you stop trying to make the mask look like something else?
What would your mask look like?
And perhaps the more interesting question:
What do you believe it would look like to someone else?
Curious about mask making? Join us:
October 17 & 24 th (as there is drying time…)
Also, if you are interested, yet cannot make those dates, drop me a line & I’ll let you know when it will be offered again: crystal@theriverrunsthrough.com