Genesis of a Tattoo

This summer our friends Sarah and Greg visited from Portland. When they arrived, I noticed something new about Sarah, a tattoo on the inside of her left forearm. It was a line from the Mary Oliver poem Wild Geese. In old fashioned, typewriter Times script, the tattoo reads, "You do not have to be good."


I was familiar with the poem as I too am a devoted Oliver fan. Here it is:


Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.


I thrilled at the brilliance of Sarah's tattoo. Such permission! Such freedom. Such belonging. I instantly wanted one. I couldn't stop thinking about it, and I shared this information with my friend Abbe, also an Oliver fan. She liked the idea of the tattoo placement but thought the choice of text to be a bit bold. She also reminded me the procedure would be painful.

The pain factor ups the ante a bit. A tattoo requires a certain passion or fool heartiness, I suppose, depending on how you view it. I am pondering my motivation and weighing the gesture. In many ways I feel as if I stand upon a precipice in life, no longer young but not yet old, doors closing on opportunities and I haven't stepped up to the threshold, relationships long on history and short on enthusiasm, patterns falling away and leaving a void; what is the next incarnation of Barb? I feel in some small way, I could follow a branded message through the keyhole, that I could reflect something essentially true, and it would help me, comfort me. The tattoo would be a bond with myself, intimate and self affirming. Or crazy? I prefer Abbe's word, bold.

Of course there's the question of whether to duplicate Sarah's act. I have yet to land on a tattoo possibility I like as much as the line from Wild Geese. Perhaps because I have in my soul "walked on my knees a hundred miles through the desert, repenting;" I have experienced despair and realized "the world goes on." I believe with every fiber of my being that true salvation lies in the majesty of "the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain, ...the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers..." and the reminder from calling geese that we are a part of the beautiful, holy mix. Just as we are.

                                                                      Photo by Brett Miller