Inked with Love

After Michael died, as someone that never wanted a tattoo, my mind went to "I must have one."

Not as some memorial, but more as a sense of stability.... "Here is something no one can take away from me, until I leave this shell." If it is the only physical thing.

You see, after his death I was afraid to love or say "I love you." to my family and friends...I knew what the pain now felt like if...correction...when I would lose them too...and I also now knew how impermanent and out of my control this life we are blessed to live, truly was. So in my odd (trauma reacting) mind, by not loving, by not trusting, I was lessening the impact of life itself. But in reality, shrinking my own.

I despised that knowledge.

And you know what, 6 hours after that tattoo was placed on my back I felt grounded for the first time since he was killed.

Rooted in a way...in a world that I felt had uprooted everything.

That sense of groundedness gave me a push of sorts, a reminder that the impermanence of it all is actually where the magic resides.

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Now, nearly sixteen years later, I found myself back on the tattoo chair, in another situation that I must be reminded constantly that I have little control over, other than how I love/react/embody/speak...

raising a human.

Rewind to a friend sending me an excerpt from Kahlil Gibran's "Prophet" the day we drove home with Selah.

To say that it struck a heart-chord is an understatement, and with each year that now goes by like quicksand, I know that the poems core message is the most precious gift I was given by my parents, that I hope to give to her.

The choice.

The choice to pick her direction....her trajectory.

To trust that my role is to be an anchor when she feels lost at sea...knowing that she must swim to it, not I, no matter how powerful the storm or waves may be.

I am the bow.

She the arrow, off into the infinite.

I added a direction-less rose compass, knowing that even I do not know where she will journey. A moon as a symbol of the phases that are all so natural (and a few other hidden messages for her and I to tell stories about).

It's not a tattoo, as much as a reminder of the most important role I've ever been blessed with. I love her beyond measure. I'm not afraid to say that. And I guess in a way that first tattoo paved the way for that gift.

On Children -Kahlil Gibran 

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
     And he said:

     Your children are not your children.
     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
     They come through you but not from you,
     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

     You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
     For they have their own thoughts.
     You may house their bodies but not their souls,
     For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
     You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
     For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
     You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
     The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
     Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
     For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

From The Prophet