hanuman

I have a tattoo of Hanuman on my arm

Tattoos are funny things. Where does the motivation for tattoos come from?
The first one was, for me, a moment of celebration.
The first tattoo symbolized the beginning of a search, reaching the age of 40, a new relationship with my body, and the pure joy of being by myself in a tiny alleyway in the middle of Bangkok. The tattoo "artist" talked on the cell phone the whole time. It took all of twenty minutes to do.The tattoo was etched on the back of my left wrist, right where a watch face covered it up.



5 years passed before the next tattoo. 3 8 hour sessions with an artist. The whole upper left arm was done of Hanuman biting the pearls that Ram had given.
The motivation was cement. There was no honor involved in the first tattoo. This one honored the commitment to the search. This tattoo cemented the relationship.


Will there be a third tattoo? Who knows? Who is searching?
The thought of Kali appears periodically. The  goddess of time and change. My kudzu.

Laughing Matters

Along this path there have been moments that evoked chuckles, guffaws, chortles, belly laughs and even giggles.
Driving cross country I would periodically go into the 'getting holy" phase. And end up laughing at myself.
Like the time I stripped naked and walked into the desert to sit and meditate. It took only minutes before the ants, whose house I had destroyed with my thoughtlessness, urgently bit my ass. My naked ass.
There was the time when I sat on the edge of a canyon. My legs painfully twisted into the appropriate form for meditation, and my mind kept wandering. I kept trying to write postcards home to friends, tried to describe seeing an eagle below me, trying to describe the powerful sound of the Colorado and the Red River meeting a thousand of feet below me. It sounded like ... like... (I was reaching for the perfect description) ... Highway 26. I laughed out loud at the attachment we have to "good sounds" (like the rushing rivers) versus the "bad sounds" of a busy interstate highway ... even though they sounded the same.

Then there were the nights in India when I lay out next to the Ganges, in Rishikesh, giving my body to the mosquitoes. It took me a year later before I laughed.
The laughter continues.