This is a little dated of an entry, but I shuffled it up into shape because I like some of it. I have so much stuff to say recently.
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On tornadoes:
I guess technically I was in my life's second (so far) tornado over the weekend before this, or at least the wall cloud. My first tornado was so dramatic and singular--I watched that skinny funnel come at me forever, I couldn't get enough of looking at it. I was so sure it was going to kill my little seventeen year old body dead.
The one of the other weekend was amazingly diffuse, rain-wrapped. I was alone in the woods in bare feet and a dress, getting ready to enter a river, and it went abruptly night-dark. The thunder started falling down around me, and the paths turning into brown creeks. I've never seen rain like that. It was all strangely cathartic. I walked back to shelter through the pelting weather and I thought about how when I was young, I used to feel like this Jonah, like there was a big tornadic storm hunting me down my whole life, and one day, it would catch up with me.
I was a dramatic teenager.
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That tornado weekend was good in other respects. I'm good at what I do. That's something I don't acknowledge to myself a lot. I feel confident about the staffing decisions I made and my leadership role. It felt affirming to control this one dumb thing when I've felt so helpless in my personal life recently.
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(It's an awkward angle to photograph.)
I got my first tattoo last week. My tattoo artist asked me why the image was significant to me, which was an innocuous question to ask someone getting an image put on their body, and I realized I didn't really want to talk about it. It's a print from John Bauer's 1907 book of Norse folk stories. I bought my first print from that series when I was 15, working my first job: that picture of Princess Tuvstarr looking into a pool for her heart.
This is a variant of my favorite print He dealt the dragon a mighty blow. I like the tension/balance of the image, the undecided circle, the throw-away courage of it.
When I was getting inked, I was alone in there, which was okay, maybe objectively sad. I might have been more nervous if someone had been able to stay with me. I put on some of my best face alone sometimes. I saw my mechanic and his wife in there before I went in, and half-way through, my mechanic stopped by to play-hassle my artist (who he knew) about how I was doing, if I was okay, and if he was doing a good enough job. I always find it a little striking when older men act... for a lack of a better word "fatherly" to me: lecture or protect me, because my actual father wasn't ever like that. He expected me to fight my own battles and stick up for myself, scorn condescension and twist it into a weapon.
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It's funny, I'm happy and very glad I got the ink, but I keep being sort of haunted by the recurring thought that it's a deliberate personality-specific addition to my body that I'll have until I die. I guess it isn't really so different than wondering if you've bought the clothes you'll die in. In the case of the tattoo, I have.
A mortality-filled post, isn't it? I don't know if that means I'm getting bad again, or just feeling myself here in my Saturn return. I'm a little head-down, in a thinky place. I'm torn between feeling cool clarity, and a little in trouble. Some people go bounding through their whole lives with total disregard. I guess the last couple weeks have made me wish I was a person more like that.
I have all my safety knots in place, though. I have this story I write for no purpose other than that it makes me happy and recently I've put in a lot of little bits on it.
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Yesterday, my brother and I went for a scramble. I love being in the woods with him because he's utterly silent, and we just go. We communicate without speaking about the obstacles or direction or ringneck snake wrapped around my fingers or Io moth. We follow each other's lead. If one of us is going in the water, we both are, even if it's blown out waist deep. There's no real point to this wandering, but it's something we both enjoy and have done on multiple occasions. Yesterday, we climbed a rockface taller than my house, and half-way up, a rock slipped under his hand and a live bat burst out from the crack.
I guess there is a point; fire for the sake of fire.
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