Blog 214 – 01.22.2016

About twenty years ago, at aged forty five, I decided it was time to get a tattoo. When I was in the military it was for many young men a sort of rite of passage getting a tattoo. I had not gotten one then using a host a reasons, primarily a religious one about not marring the body, the temple of God. The real reason was that I was afraid, of the pain and of what people would think. I guess, at forty five, I was at a place in my life where I was tired of being afraid. At any rate I got a tattoo.

Throughout my young life I had an on again off again Christian experience.  I  thought you had to get “saved” every time you “back slid.” I had been “saved” so many times it was embarrassing. I think I had even been baptized five or six time. So when I thought about a tattoo design I picked a cross with a crucified figure on it to remind me that Jesus died for me. You see I was afraid I would die not believing and hoped such a symbol on my chest might remind me to believe. Before the tattoo was healed I was in need of a good dunking again. In fact that was one of my last religious episodes where I believed that I needed to be saved. Ten years after that first tattoo I got another on the right side of my chest just to the right of Jesus on the cross. This time I got ying yang symbol which I have come to believe better represents God/The Universe than a cross with someone being murdered on it. It is a circle half white and half black. And even the white half has a black dot and the black half a white dot. This symbol I think pictorially describes the Oneness of all that is – the bright blessed day and the dark sacred night.

Instead of picking sides, black versus white or labeling everything good or bad, for me, it is no longer “either/or” but “both.” Division is the illusion, for God is One and we are one in God, one with God, and one with one another. Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson sang, “Ebony and ivory, side by side on my piano keyboard, oh Lord, why can’t we?” We do not need to be side by side if we we are one. Black and white and all the colors of the rainbow are all One. Or so it seems to me. Only little ego, the accuser of the brothers, the great liar, would have us believe otherwise.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White