I became obsessed with tattoos.Įvery day the same tattoo shops would trace their names from my thought space and dribble down from my fingertips onto a sheet of paper where I'd been drafting the picture of my safety net to be inked on me.
#Ong namo guru dev namo meaning how to
I wanted my skin to tell me how to care for a mind and soul I didn't recognize. So psychedelically unfaithful to a peaceful religion and so daringly proud. Mani Bhatia, Om Mani Padme Hum, and the lotus infused membrane from which she must have been birthed. I'd mother-daughter bond with my mom over the honeysuckle sweetness of being freed from yourself and gnaw on my tongue while she spoke. Then I started throwing up while my mother played with her prayer beads in the living room, cried when I'd see myself in the mirror. I even stopped resisting the incessant urge to watch Shahs of Sunset and let myself feel giddy and gross in the lowlight of reality TV. I stopped having sex with people, stopped pinching my thighs, stop starving myself. The Path would tell me that in whatever I do, for it to be "right," it had to leave a positive impact on me and whoever was directly around me. Because I forgot I had a face, and I forgot I had a body.
#Ong namo guru dev namo meaning full
I came upon the Eightfold Path.įor the full year preceding and through that summer, I'd given my body to different people who didn't deserve it. Paper mache solid and stiff, falling over myself and learning nothing. Instead, like my mother to her emails, I was glued. I soon after chopped it off and killed it white and stopped being able to find the time to accept that life is suffering and the more one suffers the better they are living. Knew Buddha's Mudras like his hands were my own, even kept my hair in a bun. Soon enough I knew the chants better than my mother. So I figured, if not to become myself, to become him. Nothing but an essence of subtle lovesong and the cycle of suffering. My mother says she believes in god but when she prays to Buddha she prays to a man who has no face. Some days I would, I do, forget I have a face. Sometimes that thought would drive me so contemptuous and numbingly, irritatingly, existential to believe that I was nothing but a computer program or a character in someone else's imagination. The summer before college, as most anyone who's been disowned by a father, I had no idea who I was or wanted to be. A song by a white woman in a turban, so teary beautiful it made me sick and shrunken. Breath of Life, I Bow to You, Ong Namo, Guru Dev Namo.
In the past 10 years, I've seen her deepen the taupe hollow orbs under her eyes and forgive her concealer for not covering them up, hands on her knees, covered in white flowing harem-like-pants, fingers praying aum, eyes shut and breaths quick and embarrassingly shallow.Īfter the divorce, after I lost myself in therapist-link diagnoses, after she bared witness to child abuse and while she derived a snarl-faced, creeping joy from calling my father a motherfucker over email for being a monkey hearted Muslim, she seemed to find herself able to create a center, even if just momentarily, through prayer. She is an incredible site to see when she meditates. Hair that spurs out of her scalp like fire, mouth like a grenade, and the hug of a down blanket when it hits below 30. My mother is a spiritual tigress of a woman.
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