The metaphorical language of tattoos

Well, my tattoo

Hi friends, 

This weekend has me thinking about metaphors, for two reasons: I’m beginning a unit on poetry with my seniors, and I just got a tattoo that covers the length of my arm. I’ve been trying to teach this batch of students how to think metaphorically for almost two years. I’m not sure what the glitch is in my teaching, but it still feels like a struggle not to just understand what two things are being compared, but to unpack their literal meanings fully enough so that we find the metaphorical meaning hiding within. They want to skip to the meaning without thinking in depth about the things themselves. I keep trying to demonstrate, though, that the meaning can never be accessed without literally seeing what’s there. So, this week I’m hoping to approach the lesson from a different angle–generating metaphors rather than interpreting them. 

The main lesson is this: Metaphors are found, not made. This is a truth I have to rediscover regularly. I discover it lately, when I take my students for walks, and we pass by all the baby trees we’ve planted, or notice the new, fresh life on the Montezuma Cypress or the Sycamore on our route. Look at the shape of the tiny, fuzzy, pale lime leaves of the sycamore emerging in early spring. The shape of the baby leaf bears an exact resemblance to the full grown leaf, often larger than your head, still fuzzy. I take such delight in noticing these miniatures and feel a strong compulsion to point them out to my students, but they think I’m strange enough already. 

The Montezuma Cypress has the same quality–nestled between its spindly leaves is a spiky, tiny orb–a miniature replica of the cone that covers the branches in summer. It occurs to me that if I just had time to sit a moment and write, just describing the details of what I actually sense in these natural objects, they will have something to teach me. From their dormancy inside the tree, the leaf and the cone emerge into the atmosphere. The imprint of their life, their true self, already is folded within, the jagged outline of their full-grown shape, the map of veins that will carry life and spur growth–all is already contained within the miniature form. The leaf does not need to go find itself. It needs only to become. 

II. 

I have a metaphor on my arm. 

The shape is the serpentine route of the river Sabinal, cutting through the town of the same name, in the Central Texas Hill Country. The idea comes from a vision I had, on my face in the dirt one night, on a piece of land cut through by the Sabinal. 

I could see–not like a hallucination, not like a dream, but like seeing the past in a clear sequence of images, like a video in my brain. First the image of my confirmation to catholicism. Standing at the altar with Madeleine and Erick, Catherine in utero, the priest blessing my forehead with holy water. The water dripping down my face. My heart filled with joy at the unity of my family, of a place and a ritual and a community where we could connect to the spirit. To palm sunday, the priest walking the center aisle with a palm frond, dipping in a bucket of holy water and splashing it vigorously across the congregants, surprising and soaking us so that I laughed out loud. The Lord is coming. God is coming into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey. Drops of water fell from above and greeted my face, like sunlight, like a kiss on the cheek when your eyes are closed. Then, time unfurling backwards, my children–held in the arms of a pastor, then a priest, blessed with water, doused with water running into their eyes, shocked and confused, and me beaming at them, and all the people said Amen. Then I am a child in a baptismal pool the size of a jacuzzi at the front of the baptist church I grew up in. I am standing in the water with a pastor in a white gown. I speak a profession of my faith and he dunks me backwards, all the way under water, and I rise up, dripping water down my face, drenched in white and walk up the steps, the sound of applause like a waterfall in the distance. 

These images all have held shame and regret for me in recent years. Where they used to ground me in a sense of the beauty and mystery of faith, they buried me instead under the shame and loss–what I thought was profound truth nurturing me was actually a lie keeping me from the truth of myself. 

But in this moment, these images flashed with the beauty and purity of water–I saw them emerging again in sequence, and the water in each image pooling together in a ribbon, a thread of beauty, a spirit. She spoke in utter clarity: These moments were not lies. I was here all along. Your heart is pure, dear one. You were seeking the spirit, and I am here. You poured yourself out to me, and I poured myself out to you, bathed you, surprised and refreshed you, anointed you and your children, and there is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to regret. You are on a journey and I have been with you all along. The shame and fear and blockage to prayer that had stuck in my throat for years broke open in me, and I wept and wept. I had my head resting on my fists, held my body together like a child and saw the thread of water sew together the parts of my spirit story that had unraveled and frayed. I felt the shreds inside my heart sewn back together and breathed in an expanding wholeness. I wept and wept and felt the tears streaming with the force of a river out of my eyes. I wasn’t sobbing with the struggle of tears; they just flowed from me. I reached out to taste the salt streaming down my cheeks and was shocked: there was no salt in these tears. It was pure water, pure water streaming out my eyes, watering the earth. 

III. 

I wanted only the river form, snaking around my arm, and had given the artist an image of the Sabinal, so she could evoke the shape of the river that wound through the land where the water spoke to me. The image I had found, though, included the grid of the city, Sabinal, that the river passes through. The artist suggested including an abstract rendering of the map grid, with the highways intersecting the river. I told her, I have to think about it. I have to think about it symbolically. I paused for an awkwardly long time, sitting in her chair. Yes, yes. The grid should be there, with its highways crossing over the river’s flow. She drew it on my arm and traced along one highway with her finger tip, “Let’s do this one in red.” “Yes,” I replied without hesitation. It was right for the metaphor.

IV. 

Metaphors are found, not made. Metaphors are a way of paying attention. When we describe, with attention, the intricacy of the world around us, it mirrors the intricacy within. It’s enough for me, in this moment, not to demand or assert an answer as to why this would be true. It’s a question to be lived. It’s a question that holds the hand of another question and pulls it downstream–if this is true, how does it shape the way we live? 

V. 

I had wanted just the river’s form, the pure meandering of pure water, reminding me that I am threaded together by Spirit that never abandons me, that never has mocked me, that always nourishes and carries me downstream. 

But, the artist’s rendering of the grid tapped into the other element of experience. The river doesn’t exist alone, not in the world I live in, not in the life I have lived. The structures of human experience, human attempts at understanding, and, through understanding, control, bisect the river like a wound. The red gash of highway harms, pollutes, disrupts the river’s flow, drives her underground. The grid cutting through the river formed a reminder to me–the river threads together even the wounds of control and lies. 

Now I wear this story on my skin. 

It feels right, like finding clothes that fit how you feel inside.

 

VI. 

Metaphors are a form of paying attention. The vision of the water I wear on my body carries meaning beyond itself, as do the leaves that unfurl their inner form. The water stands for the interconnectedness of spirit and matter across a lifetime. But it also stands for itself–the human body is composed of water, about 70%, and the earth also is saturated with 70% water content. The water that flows in my veins, that sweeps the river Sabinal around the limestone bends, has existed on earth since its formation. When we take a sip of water, we imbibe an ancient life force that has brought and nourished life for all of time as we can conceive of it. 

The physical reality itself is a spiritual truth. Just paying attention to what is here gives a map to all the meaning we can possibly hold. 

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

P.S. A nice companion to this essay is

Michael Wright

’s Still Life essay yesterday, “Radishes.” He writes about how poetry can pull us back into the world, the physicality of being a body on the earth, and provides a poem that does just that.