fiction & caffeine

The Vinyasa teacher I took today said this in class, while explaining where our Root Chakra is. Yoga teachers! They are great. She went on to say how she’d get one eventually, after being barred by her parents for religious reasons (this is a middle-aged woman). She said, “One day I’ll have the courage.” “Courage” isn’t a word people often assign to the getting-of-tattoos, but it’s the one that most resonates with me. I too put off getting a tattoo out of fear of parental retribution, so when I finally got one last November it gave me a huge sense of relief, and of autonomy. Banal “I’m a grown-up, I do what I want!” autonomy, and autonomy in the sense that I was, for the first time, defining myself. I got a skull doodle of Jeff Buckley’s because I’d been listening to a lot of Buckley and reading my teenage journals, in which there are pages and pages about his music, and his lyrics are carefully written in pink gel pen. I never want to lose that girl, and I never want to forget how important his music is. And so, the ink. The process itself is cathartic because there’s so little about your physical self that you have control of, yet there you are emblazoning your outside with some essential representation of what’s within, what’s important and valued. In the next month or two I’ll get another, and I have another planned for when I finish yoga teacher training. We come full circle, because it was this yoga teacher who was a student with me in another class earlier this week who asked if I’d done teacher training and said I’d be a great teacher (she doesn’t know how difficult it is for me to talk to people, but that’s another reason I want this challenge). I’d been doubting myself about whether this was something I should be saving for and working toward (because I want to do it in Puerto Rico), but I took it as a sign. Tattoos, teacher training, courage.