I got my first tattoo in plain sight, where I could see it, where everyone could see it. It’s a little outline of a triangle, like a hollow mountain. A mountain that could be filled.
Mountains are some of my favorite things in the world. When I want to really get to the essence of God, without all these songs and words and phrases and contexts we have for him, I look at the mountains. It feels raw to me, deliciously abstract. Beauty and glory’s tabula rasa, bare and jarring, unneedy, content. I feel like I’m looking back, before we start adding all our misconceptions and ideas and small praises. Sometimes I just want to be.
But I didn’t choose a mountain for my tattoo because I love mountains. I choose it because I am afraid of them.
I always had a dream to live in the mountains. It didn’t come true until high school. I moved to one of the most beautiful places that (even in retrospect) I have ever been. But before I moved there, before I knew I would move there, I visited. And I was terrified of the mountains. They were my enemies. For some reason, those particular mountains threatened to close in on me, attack me, consume me, laugh at me, chase me away because I didn’t belong there. It was true, I thought, I didn’t belong there. Could never.
That was before I lived among them. Now the mountains surrounding Anchorage, Alaska are beautiful to me, home to me. But they have never stopped being wild. Never stopped being as uncomfortable as wolf teeth on the neck. Never stopped being the truest kind of mountains.
I don’t know if they ever will be safe, but I know they are good. And I’ve learned that comfort hardly ever means best or right. That’s the kind of mountain I got tattooed on my hand.
Seven glorious unending Alaskan summers, and six gnawing winters later I took a job in South Florida. Building up to the move, I had recurring nightmares and senses that I would die on the way there, in a plane crash. But I also knew I had to go. It was my next adventure. This ties into another important part of the tattoo. I see the good yet uncomfortable/terrifying paradox summed up well in the concept of adventure. Adventure rips you out of your comfort zone. Adventures can range from the mild: exploring a new country by yourself, to the extreme: taking a risk in expressing that you love someone, etc. But either way, “adventures make you late for dinner.” They are not straightforward, predictable, or tame.
I feel I will die if I don’t travel the world. But because of my fear of flying (it inconveniently increases the more I fly) I often feel that I will literally die if I do. Like the mountains, adventures aren’t safe. But they’re good. I’d rather die trying to travel than never travel. I’d rather live risking that God is real than to die without ever believing. Even if God is not real, God is the most beautiful idea I know. Even if the plane does crash, I’m setting off with my little pack and my comfy shoes.
On the flight from Alaska to Florida I also told myself I would get a tattoo like the one I have if I made it alive to my next adventure. And slowly, the more alive I became, the more I realized that arriving was just a part of it. That moment of “safe” solid ground isn’t at all a resolution, it’s at best a transition. The adventure started with saying I would go. By choosing beauty over safety. Ironically, at this point, the safety was back in the mountains of Alaska that I used to be so afraid of. I am still afraid of them sometimes. But I am not only afraid. There is more now than just my fear. There is love. There is more than doubt, there is faith. That’s why I wanted my little mountain to be hollow inside. So it could be filled with the things that, unlike fear, can truly sustain me. Now I have sometimes fear but always wonder. Always the sense that if I could pick any mountains in the whole world, it would be those. Any adventure, it would be this.