Tattoo shadows

These things we carry in us, in our children. The tattoos of our forefathers and mothers is a kind of shadowlight.

Lineage runs deep, is intangible.

Our invisible inheritances are masked for a time. A deepset compass —unbeknownst to us — seems buried in subconscious.

A mother is shouting at her child on the trail to the beach. I knew she was angry by the way she retrieved the beachball from the ditch—snatch!

Dad and brother standby. The child being shouted at is now wailing in distress. Maybe a similar scene has been witnessed by them before, maybe the father knows better than to say; ‘ENOUGH!’

I wonder what the consequences of that would be? I don’t know their wider story, just this vignette scene that stays with me. Angry sped-up movement is a force not in keeping with a family day out. There is much context missing in the ire.

I walk past the fence tattoos that shadow the sand on the walkway to the freedom and froth of Ocean. I have been a mother ‘losing it’ with her children. Maybe not with the ferocity of venom witnessed here, but I have felt extreme overwhelm.

There’s a space between rebuttals received, and what is returned. Love received and returned. Circuits. This forms part of our emotional lives.

I wonder if this generation can be the one where the match can be removed, from the line of matchsticks on fire? To soothe the wildfires burning across the generations.

A circuit-breaking generation.

Sometimes God reaches through the clouds to speak.

‘What is to give light must endure burning’. Viktor Frankl, holocaust survivor and author of ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’.

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.”

Above is a blend statement of Victor Frankl who went on to inspire Stephen Covey

Henna tattoo, Lacanau, Gironde, France