Without telling you the whole story of how the design came
to me, my ink reads, “Destroyer of
Illusion.” The script looks sufficiently
Indo-Himalayan, the pattern sufficiently abstract, that lots of people curious
enough to ask me about it assume it’s not in English. The letters striate from
the perimeter into a tightly described circle, a part of my body visible to
others but not to me. I take it on faith that it’s there.
Well, maybe you get the idea...
“Destroyer of Illusion” can mean a lot of things. When the
phrase started running incessantly through my mind, I pictured Keanu Reeves in The Matrix as vividly as the warrior
boddhisattvas of Tibetan Buddhism. Only later did I get it that those three
words, and the design I’d made of them, were teaching me a lesson about
acknowledging my First Chakra. Big surprise--embodied wisdom isn’t always a
matter of cognition, or of self-awareness in a dominantly intellectual sense. Sometimes
it’s a matter of going down into the earth and into the silent, unseen roots of
our life, rather than up into the clarity of an elevated realm of light. It’s a
matter of trust that it’s not only safe, it’s even essential, to be seen from
another perspective than that of our own ego.
“We go down, like moles, claws scrabbling in the soil,” sing
The Hidden Cameras. “The journey goes down, not up,” writes Pema Chödrön. “A
man walks upright, and the food in his body is shut in, as if in a well-made
purse,” says Julian of Norwich. “When the time of his necessity comes, the
purse is opened and then shut again, in most seemly fashion. And it is God who does this, as it is shown
when he says that he comes down to us in our humblest needs.”
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