Hello.
Bring your shoulders up to your ears on an inhale and circle them back and down on an exhale.
One more time.
Inhale those shoulders up.
Let's exhale and circle them down and back.
Welcome to a hit of hope and just a fair warning,
This one is salty.
My father hated tattoos.
Many from his generation did,
But you see,
My dad was a flight surgeon on board a naval ship.
So his experience with tattoos was that the men would get shore leave,
Get drunk,
Sew some wild oats,
Get the name of the wild oat tattooed on their arms,
Come back on board the ship,
Wake up with their head in the toilet,
And the name of a woman,
Not their wife,
Tattooed on their arms.
They would come into my father and ask him to get the tattoo off.
So my father hated tattoos.
But obviously tattoos are coming into their own.
Considered by many to be art,
Tattoos are ways we can make our skin mean something.
I've thought long and hard about getting a tattoo but so far,
I can't think of anything I want to carry around on my skin for the rest of my life,
So I haven't gotten one yet.
But I have given myself plenty of temporary tattoos,
Especially in the last two years.
Without veering off into my story or asking anyone to feel sorry for me,
Suffice it to say that the last two years have taken a huge physical and emotional toll on me.
But one of the ways I coped with the hard hammer of life is that I would take a sharpie and write a temporary tattoo on the inside of my wrist.
I would see flashes of it throughout my day,
And those messages were reminders of how I wanted to live.
One such temporary tattoo during the worst of the worst times was the word Marvel.
This came to me after watching the movie Captain Marvel.
I won't give anything away,
But what inspired me in that movie were not her awesome superpowers,
But the fact that when she was human and getting the shit kicked out of her by life again and again,
She got the fuck back up.
Plus,
Isn't it so much better to look at the world and marvel rather than choose some of those other ways of being,
Like cower or control or compete so hard you burn yourself up in exhaustion?
Marvel is a wonderful,
Astonishing thing,
A cause of surprise and wonder,
Something to admire.
You.
You are a marvel.
Please do not argue.
You are a marvel wonderfully made astonishing.
You are a marvel,
Something to admire.
My second common temporary tattoo might seem a weird choice,
But I'm nothing if not weird.
And that second temporary tattoo is Be the Weed.
During my yoga teacher training,
We heard a story about a majestic oak and a scrappy weed that lived by the same river.
One spring,
When the snows and the mountains had melted,
The river broke free of its banks.
While the tree was beautiful and tall,
It was also unbending.
The force of the river uprooted the tree,
And it got carried away by the swollen river.
But the weed was flexible.
It stayed low to the ground.
It was scrappy,
And it knew how to fight to survive.
Those are the very qualities that helped the weed handle the rushing water.
When the flood had passed,
There was the weed,
Rising out of the mud and reaching toward the light.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Marvel.
Be the weed.
Find your own mantras or metaphors,
Your own temporary tattoos to live into.
Ones that help you live in wonder and rise into your best self.
Ones that help you reach again and again for the light.
Namaste.
