The Tattoos I Still Hide from my Parents

and thoughts on Meister Eckhart - a mashup.

Welcome back everyone from the long hot summer! I know it’s still summer, but I’m back at school so it feels over. This year I’m coming back as both a teacher and a student as I’ve started my first classes in a Master’s degree in Theopoetics and Writing at a co-led program through Bethany Theological Seminary and Earlham School of Religion. I’m taking Creative Non-Fiction and Theopoetics. Fun!

So since I’m having to write a ton, I’m afraid you’re going to be seeing some of my assignments here. This first is an attempt at a lyric essay. If you are interested in learning more about creative non-fiction, I’m loving the book we’re using Tell it Slant by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola. Hope you enjoy!

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Laying Claim to the Ground of My Body

“How do we find words to bear witness, not to explain it because it’s not explainable, but what’s the language that doesn’t break the depth of the union, but a language that moves with the rhythms of the union itself? It’s like the monks in the monastery are chanting the Psalms. There’s something about the rhythm of chanting. Someone once said that when we sing a hymn, we sing a joyful hymn unto the Lord, but when we chant, we deepen our capacity to listen. I think Eckhart’s like that too. I think Eckhart’s language is highly evocative. It’s the language of listening.” - Jim Finley, Turning to the Mystics

My dad used to tell me and my siblings he’d do “tattoo-checks” as we slept.  I know that sounds kinda pervy, but it was more the unforgivable rule . No Tattoos! My siblings and I weren’t easy.  Dad used to say we took “stupid pills” and honestly I think we did, but no matter what we did as long as there was no “Mom” tattooed on our shoulders, we were golden.  

You shall not make any cuts in your body for the dead nor make any tattoo marks on yourselves: I am the Lord. - Leviticus 19:28

My sister was the first to break the rule. She got an ichthus on her lower right abdomen. I suppose she felt like if it was ever discovered, at least it was a Christian symbol and they couldn’t get too mad.

Tattoo #1: 2006  Location: Left Foot

Image:  The Word  “Laugh”

My friend Nick and I wrote a play about a priest who broke into nuclear missile silos on Good Friday dressed as a clown. It is called “And Carl Laughed”  because when Carl was in jail he’d call his Catholic Worker friends and tell jokes. We were on a bus in Edinburgh at the Fringe when I said to one of my students in the play, “you know what would be a great tattoo?” After graduation, she came and picked me up at school and we went down to the local parlor and got matching tats.  Her parents did not approve. 

Eckhart calls us “to fidelity to the gift of life itself.” The quote below sounds like something Carl would say. A bit nonsensical at first glance but the “I don’t know”-ing of it all speaks to a deeper mystery. A child-like sincerity.

“Why do you love God? I don’t know, because of God. Why do you love the truth? Because of the truth. Why do you love justice? Because of justice. Why do you love goodness? Because of goodness. Why do you live? My word, I do not know, but I’m happy to live.”

- Meister Eckhart

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I hid the “laugh” on my foot for quite a while even though my sister’s fish had already been outed by her pregnant belly.  When my sister got pregnant her senior year at an East Coast Christian college, my dad dropped everything he was doing and moved up there to take care of her as she finished her senior year. While that could be construed as controlling and policing my sister’s body, it wasn’t.  He was gentle and caring. It was the first time, and a very rare time, I witnessed my father as a caregiver.  

He gave her more shit for the tattoo than for getting pregnant.

Tattoo #2: 2009  Location: Right Abdomen

Image: The Word “Breathe” 

I went to the funeral of my son’s best friend’s mother.  She died of colon cancer. Quickly and painfully.  I was 39.  I was not where I wanted to be in my life.  That day I got a tattoo instead of a divorce. It gave me breathing room. 

We interact with the world through what Eckhart calls “our powers.” These include our intellect, our memory, our will to love, and we think these powers lead us to why we love God or justice or truth and these powers show us why we love living. But, Eckhart says, it is our essence that is at the heart of the I-don’t-know-mystery because our essence is at the root of who we are, beyond the scope of powers.

Finely says we are probably closest to our essence as infants and on our deathbed, when our powers are at their weakest. And while our powers are an important gift, Eckhart invites us to be sensitive to the stirrings of our essence.

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I think my dad did see my “Laugh” tattoo eventually. They live in Florida and I couldn’t wear sneakers forever.  When he saw it he  just shook his head and scoffed. I was relieved.  But I wasn’t going to risk it so when I got “Breathe” on my belly I was pretty sure my dad would never see it. I was 39 years old. 

When I told my dad I was getting a divorce he said that my maternal grandmother was married to an alcoholic and she stayed, surely I could stay. I told him that maybe if she had left he would have gotten sober before he fell down the stairs when my mom was 18. 

Tattoo #3: 2012  Location: Upper Back 

Image: feathered heart with flames that say “yes”

My favorite teacher died.  He taught me how to say “yes.” 

We live this life of faith, which are the powers illumined by grace, the essence of which is love. God is love. When we die and pass through the veil of death, we move from a veiled oneness with God to an unveiled oneness with God in glory, to live God’s life as infinitely as God lives God’s infinite life in our eternal nothingness without God.

- Jim Finley, Turning to the Mystics

Our mistake, Finely says, is that we think we are just a Self that things happen to when in reality we have always been and will always be in this oneness with God. Eckhart describes it as a reflection in a mirror. Imagine this reflection believed that it could walk away and have a life of its own without the person it was reflecting. It thinks it’s real — and while it is real, it's not real in the way it thinks it’s real. We are intimately and lovingly connected so that our very essence rests in the essence of God’s being. We just forget.

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We moved to Connecticut when I was four years old when my dad was transferred to work in the Manhattan office of CBS Records. He worked with bands like Sly and the Family Stone, Black Sabbath, and the Beach Boys. Our family’s prized possession is a 1969 picture of my dad, his best friend, Frankie, and between them, Janis Joplin holding a bottle of Jack Daniels. 

My dad, the son of a Baptist preacher, was moving to the big city and going to clubs where bouncers had tattoos, artists had tattoos, and his friends had tattoos.  But by morning he’d wake up in bed next to his tattoo-less wife in the wooded suburbs. The woods where his daughter was learning the language of silence.

Tattoo #4: 2015. Location: Inside Right Arm

Image: blackberries, honeysuckle and a gypsy moth

When I was five I had a honeysuckle fort in the woods.  I’d walk there on sunny days and, when in season, eat from the blackberry bushes on the way.  It was a huge boulder surrounded by fragrant honeysuckle.  I’d climb up onto the top leaving my hands pockmarked with pebbles.  I’d sun myself and suck the honeyed stems.  I realized much later, 40 years later, this was my first experience of God in silence.  

Gelassenheit: to release or let go

We remember our belovedness only when we are able to detach from the things we allow to lay claim to us that steer us away from this depth of belovedness. This is what Eckhart calls “the birth of the word in the soul.”

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When my father saw my largest and most prominent tattoo on my forearm in a social media post he called me.  He just said, “I’m glad your grandparents are dead and don’t have to see this.” I was 46 years old.  

I blocked my parents from all of my social media accounts after that. 

Tattoo #5: 2017. Location: Inside Left Arm

Image: the letter ‘r’ 

I went with my friend who had just gotten divorced to get her first tattoo.  “You have to save yourself.”  I asked her if that was what she really wanted to get?  “Do you believe that?” I asked her.  “Yes,” she said.  She shortened it to “Save Yourself”  We didn’t check the script and when it was finished, to her horror, it said “Save Youself.”  We drank a few bottles of champagne and cried until we started laughing.  I said I’d go get the same tattoo.  She said she only needed an R.  So we went back that night. Slightly drunk and I got a tiny ‘r’ where hers would have been.  We hugged and I whispered, “See, you can’t save yourself. We need others to hold space for us.” 

Eckhart teaches us that God is not loving; God is Love. God is not generous; God is Generosity. You and God are One, God’s ground is your ground; so too God is infinitely presencing God’s self in love and generosity to and through you. Confused yet? Remember, Eckhart is the language of listening. Listen to that again with your heart. As Finely says, “God is giving God’s self away through our very life and our eternal nothingness without God. In our very nothingness without God, God also gives us the gift of the power to love, that we might love God in return and love others and love all things. Eckhart says, ‘This is the gift of our faith.’”

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By now my dad was used to my tattoo on my forearm, although I still covered it up so as not to incur the dreaded scoff. But when I got the ‘r’ my friend Bess and I showed my parents proudly.  And my parents smiled.  They loved Bess. My crazy friend who loves her cocktails and doesn’t censor how many “fucks” she gives around them. I think she reminds Dad of Studio 54. So when I proudly displayed the ‘r’ as she told the story, champagne in hand, and my dad laughed, I felt a freedom I hadn’t before. This is what it feels like to tell the truth. To be accepted. This is what it feels like to live in my body without  hiding.

Tattoo #6: 2018. Location: Inner Left Arm

Image: A nautilus shell surrounded by seaweed (incorporating the lone scripted r)

“Year after year beheld the silent toil

That spread his lustrous coil;

Still, as the spiral grew,

He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,

Stole with soft step its shining archway through,

Built up its idle door,

Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.”  

from The Chambered Nautilus by Oliver Wendel Holmes

But even in light of this Oneness, we still believe like the mirrored reflection that our powers and the daily troubles we encounter are enough to lay claim to who we are. That phrase - lay claim to who we are… what is it that you allow to lay claim to you that is anything less that your absolute belovedness? So many things, right? But in Eckhart’s path, we walk daily trying to become more aware of these things trying to lay claim. We continue the path of detachment. We walk in awareness and keep returning to the ground of all being, to our nothingness apart from God. And in this daily practice the ground begins to shine through us like light through gossamer.

This was a stealthy coming, in a whispering stillness to reveal itself. See, just because it is hidden, one must and should and always pursue it. It shone forth, and yet it was hidden. We are meant to yearn and sigh for it. - Meister Eckhart

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I was wearing him down.  I wore long sleeves in the Florida heat for a long time but eventually he saw the matching tattoo on my left arm.  He never asks what they mean. He just rolls his eyes.  But he still rubs my neck as we sit watching tv on the couch in spite of the feathered heart and flames.

Tattoo #8: 2019 Location: Upper Right Arm

Image: Kwan Yin

My idea of the divine feminine was Dana Carvey’s Church Lady character from Saturday Night Live.  This is what I told Mirabai Starr at a retreat.  She didn’t get the joke because she grew up in a commune in New Mexico where Ram Dass named her.  I guess they didn’t watch Saturday Night Live.  After the retreat I read “Becoming Kwan Yin” by Stephen Levine. It was the Christ story, I thought.  I didn’t know Jesus was also a goddess. 

“For the birth of the Word in the soul is a state of being liberated to a path of detachment where, little by little or all at once, there is the welling up of God, being born and lying awake at night, listening to our breathing or looking out the window or taking a sip of tea or drifting off to sleep at night, waking up in the morning. We can learn to live in an habitual state of this birthing, intimately realized that the divinity of our ordinariness, incarnate infinity intimately realized.” - Jim Finely, Turning to the Mystics

Kwan Yin is the Goddess of compassion and followed a similar path of detachment which led to abundant love and generosity of spirit. This is the miracle of this spiritual path, that the giving up doesn’t feel like an asceticism - a sacrifice - but rather an allowance of love to move in and through you. “Learning to live in this habitual state of this birthing” of our divine ordinariness. Kwan Yin started as a princess who disobeyed her father and was sent to be cloistered to take care of the sick and dying. Once the princess became an ordinary nurse and caregiver, she became a goddess. “Incarnate infinity intimately realized.”

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Once I posted a quote from Thich Nhat Hahn on twitter and my dad’s response was “Buddhism, really Kelley?” 

The Kwan Yin is still the tattoo that my parents don’t know I have.  I still hide the top of my right bicep.  I don’t plan on ever showing them. When I started going to a local sangha and reading Buddhist texts I started understanding more of who Jesus was.  “Oh, that’s what Jesus meant.” would echo in my mind.  There was an expansiveness. 

As I lay on the table to get the last tattoo I’ve gotten so far and I told the artist, Marie, the story of Kwan Yin and Magdalene and why I felt compelled to claim my body for them, to hold space for the beauty of their stories,I cried.  I had ten people who made pilgrimage with me to Santa Fe to get this tattoo.  They sat and drank Tempranillo and ate squid ink pasta while I lay in silent sacrament, offering up my body once again.  Choosing the stories that my body bears witness to.  

Tattoo #9: 2022. Location: Front Left Arm

Image: Mary Magdalene with three faces and dressed as a tower

Three days before I left for New Mexico to get my long awaited Magdalene tattoo from the retablos artist, Marie Sena, I heard this sermon. Magda is not where Magdalene was born.  It means Tower.  A nickname from her beloved. 

Eckhart says that when we see a tree and take in its image with our senses we internalize the image of the tree, but this internalized image is not the presence of the tree. It is not Tree-ness, as Plato would say. So we walk around with all these empty images of the world and its creatures, but if we were to look deeply and contemplate the very essence of the things, we would be contemplating the very essence of God.

“He who knew nothing other than creatures would have no need for thinking of sermons, for each creature is full of God and is a book.” - Eckhart

My mom and dad lived with me for a month last year between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  It was hard and messy and a success considering I only told my dad to fuck off once.  And while I wasn’t hiding my tattoos per se, I was dressing for the cold weather.  But one day my mom saw my Mary Magdalene tattoo and asked me who it was.  I told her that it was Mary.  She had three faces because historically we women and our stories have been conflated into few women and one story.  I told her the dress that looked like a tower was meant to signify that Magdalene means tower and that Jesus, who nicknamed all his beloved disciples, named her that.  My mom looked at me for a long moment and said, “Kelley, I think you are the most interesting person I know.” 

The tragedy of life is when we see our own image as a compilation of our daily productivity and fears and allow this to lay claim to who we are. But if we get quiet and pay attention to the shining moments - a baby’s gripping hand, the poem that comes late at night, the quiet breath of the dying, the simple grandeur of a tree, a mother’s rare and loving word - and we pay attention to these shining moments in us, where in our nothingness love is still revealed, and through our ink-marked gossamer skin the ground shines through.

Be well friends,

Kelley