temporary, tattoos

a note on missing riding

As I type, the friendly clownfish shimmers over my hand. It’s the 100th day of school and my daughter wanted to celebrate with temporary tattoos. It’s a familiar ritual by now, ever since the birthday party that sent home a sleeve of ocean animals. We have worn sea turtles, friendly starfish, a baby otter, a shell. They have been our companions in kindergarten, second, fourth grade days, swinging with us between a study of Ecclesiastes and a study of the monkey bars.

This companion in my journey is so fleeting and yet so prominent. I watch him swim across my skin, I take him with me into the kitchen and the laundry, into the books on theology, into the deep dark of not knowing what I am doing, where I am going, not being sure, as perhaps all of us at some point are not sure, why God asked this.

On my other arm my newest tattoo sits in stillness. It’s my horse’s brand and a lily of the valley, my trainer’s favorite flower. Between the two of them I lived in what now seems like a dream of discernment: every ride, honesty with God, honesty with myself. There is no hiding from yourself when you ride. It was on that circle we rode together, you and me, that I came to know myself as a writer again, fumbling for the words of faith through the images of that circle, that gift of trying again, that gift of partnership and trust.

It was on that circle I confronted myself as a perfectionist - my dissatisfaction and my inherent trust of dissatisfaction, like I would and could only believe the worst of me. And it was on that circle that I confronted the impossibility of living my life that way.

You might say that horse found my worst and made me ride through it. Every missed transition and jerk in the saddle, every moment he spooked and I lurched, every time I tried to cue a canter and he kicked out, every time the trot was too fast or too bouncy, and my trainer’s voice rang out:

Get quiet with your body, push your legs down, get out of his face…

We rode through it.

To say I miss him, and I miss riding, is hard to admit. Shouldn’t I be happy, I tell myself all the time, at the unbelievable gift of this calling into ministry? Shouldn’t I want for nothing, because here I get to write and think and talk about big ideas, and all the beauty of the world rushes out to me in the mornings at the park walking the dog? And shouldn’t I only ever sing a song of praise to God? What right have I to any lamentation?

But this is also hiding from myself. And Frosty would make me ride through it. A demand to be grateful, always, to be happy, always, to be shiny, always, is a demand for an insubstantial self. A temporary tattoo of the right kind of feelings that is still me grabbing at the reins and trying to control the outcome.

I miss riding in a way I don’t know how to describe. I miss the self it made me meet, I miss the honesty I had with him. I miss believing that my body was a partner, and not an enemy, to my mind. I miss the smell of the barn, the way you can put your face into his side and cry more truthfully about hospitals and NICUs than you’ve ever cried before. I miss how he held all the things I didn’t think I would ever say out loud. I miss that he taught me God is listening to all those things.

I miss feeding him too many cookies and the particular rub of my boots on the space behind my knees. I miss the bluebirds that nest in the paddock next door. I miss the canter, I miss the unyielding energy of the trot, I miss the arena dust and wash racks and all the grit of it.

I can’t find my way through this on an 18m circle in an arena; but I carry him with me, inked on my skin.

Maybe that is enough to begin.