Thursday  Aug 17, 2006

Every BODY Has a Story: Living Poetry

There’s a book called The Prophet, that was written in the early nineteen hundreds by a Lebanese-American man named Khalil Gibran. It became very popular in the sixties and seventies as people became open to the idea of spiritualism. My grandmother actually gave the book to my mother as a present, and often, my mother read The Prophet to me as a child. When I was older, she passed the book on to me.

I have always loved the book, and it has been a sort of reference guide for me on life. The section of the book that my mother read to me was the chapter on children. The book is a sort of prose poem and this section begins,

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls…

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”

This tattoo is based on the image in that chapter. In the original, The main figure of the archer is male, but I had Autumn Marshall from Icon Tattoo redraw it for me as a female character. I am a doula by profession, which is a woman who aids in births and afterbirth care.

I leave a copy of this book for every new parent with whom I work."

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