This week, In two separate sessions, a new therapist and an old therapist referenced the metaphoric "bus"Â asking:
"Who's driving the bus?"
The bus metaphor is most known from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), developed by Steven Hayes. It posits that the bus is our life and that the passengers arrive on board from our unique experiences. They become a collective feeling body that responds and reacts to life's circumstances. Passengers who are compounded with trauma become challenges to bus drivers because of their adverse reaction towards anything hinting at danger. Trauma passengers work hard to divert the bus from potential threats, and drive the bus off course. These passengers become especially agitated when the bus approaches unfamiliar territory.Â
One therapist, let's call them #1, a traditional talk therapist, asked me to draw the bus with an understanding that the bus has layers: the human, the more-than-human, and the other-than-human. They told me I would not know everyone on the bus, but I needed to know who was holding the wheel.
#2, a trauma specialist who uses neurofeedback and EMDR, had me conjure my younger selves into a safe space, which ironically was the room of #1; after I identified who was there, they asked me who was driving the bus.
I am not quick to adopt the bus metaphor because I already have a boat. Often, my boat is a canoe, but sometimes it has a sail. This is why when I drew my bus it had wings and a fishtail but no wheels.Â
After drawing my flying fish bus, I titled it Mebus. Mebus, a vessel of me (plural me's) and memories. It turns out that mebus is a word in Arabic; it means delegate, or the one empowered to represent the other. There may be an ancient Arabic me on my mebus who whispered this word to me. #1 told me that we will never know everyone on our bus, that our buses are mystery buses.
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This past month, I discovered the Amazon woman from an image of a tattooed piece of ancient skin and my continued research of ancient Greek pottery.Â
The Amazon woman was a warrior, often covered in tattoos, and from a society of gendered equals. Amazons were famous horse riders fighting with bow, arrow, and sword. They are immortalized by the Greeks in their literature and pottery, but often through the lens of their male-dominated culture, illustrating the Amazons falls in battle.Â
The Amazons appear to have originated as a nomadic Scythian tribe. According to scientists and archaeologists, Scythian civilization flourished between the sixth and second centuries BCE. It is important to note that ancient nomadic cultures were always multiethnic, and the Scythians migrated between what we now know as Europe and Asia. There are nomadic Mongolian tribes today that are thought to be related to ancient Amazons through Scythian and Sarmatian heritage. The art of horseback riding and bow and arrow is still taught to young women there today.
The tattooed skin that enraptured me belongs to the "Siberian Ice Maiden," a woman from Pazyryk culture, a Scythian tribe. She was discovered mummified in ice in 1993, buried in the center of a sacrificed circle of horses, with a belted cosmetic bag carrying green and blue eyeliner and cannabis. She had tattoos down her arms and on her fingers. She wore a silk blouse and a striped wool skirt. Her head was shaved and topped with a wig with a golden ornamented horn like crown sticking out. She was a twenty-five-year-old warrior and a very fashionable woman. Someone who we might call punk.
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I hadn't visited #1 in many years. They were my first therapist. They helped me survive treading water in the darkness of my grief when my sister died. They are a lighthouse.Â
I reached out now because I've been feeling unmoored. I am in uncharted, muddy waters. I also contacted #2 because I feel my body is in panic. Drowning without air, my chest is tight.
#1 reviewed my current sea and pointed to the perimenopausal stage, known as the Amazon period in female archetypes, the seven-year cycle between forty-three and fifty characterized by shifts towards radical authenticity at all costs, also called a second adolescence.
During my session with #2, the younger self who showed up most vividly was my 12- to 13-year-old self. She was sitting on the edge of the couch in #1's office, trying to model perfect goodness while looking out for everyone else in the room to protect them from getting in trouble for which she would also be in trouble. She was white-knuckled, fingernails chewed to bloody bits, eyebrows torn from their place, teeth ground down, terrified. This self, she’s been the adolescent warrior holding the wheel of the mebus for a long while.
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Lately, I have been thinking of getting more tattoos. Tattoos are something my father called degenerate, something my husband doesn't like, something not for women, something that marks a person.
I have been contemplating bands of water, crowns of roses, crabs, stars, and suns.Â
There is an indigenous group of people called Ryukyuans. Although officially unrecognized, Ryukyuans constitute the largest ethnolinguistic minority group in Japan, Ryukyuans inhabit the Amami Islands, where the women are tattooed in traditional markings called Hajichi. The tattoos represent pride in being a woman, beauty, and protection. They were associated with rites of passage for women and often adorn the hands and arms. Women in this culture are also venerated as people who hold the spiritual power for the well-being of all, and it is thought that they were a matriarchal society. The women are also tattoo artists. In 1899, the Meji Government banned the tattoo practice, and stigma and shame replaced a noble belief and female practice.
Similarly, the Samoan women are marked with tattoos. In their ancient cosmology, their creators, siamese twin goddesses (Taema and Tilafaiga), came by water and brought the art of tattoos from Figi. The word tattoo originates from their culture. Later, Tilafaiga became a war goddess, while Taema became a tattooist and teacher of the art she had learned in Fiji. The word for a female tattoo is malu, which means to be protected and sheltered. Tattoos there indicate a readiness for life, for adulthood, and to be of service to the community.
When I see images of the Polynesian women receiving their malu or the Ryukyuans giving one another hajichi, I wonder if we would need therapists if we still had a culture of women initiating women through transitions? A little stick and poke.
For Samoan Wayfinders, hand tattoos have stars and dots called togitogi up the fingers. Wayfinding is navigating the ocean on a large canoe without nautical instruments. When navigating, the Wayfinder lays its thumb across the horizon while its other fingers stand vertically to align their markings with the stars. Every tattoo is unique to that navigator's experience and knowledge. Interestingly, the original navigators were Pacific women. It's part of the Nafanua story [Nafanua was known throughout Samoa as a Goddess of War]. She ruled all over Samoa, and she was an accomplished navigator.
Could the Samoan goddess have trained for war by slaying her fear on the open waters in a canoe?
Young female navigator Kala Tanaka says:
"We memorize the rising and setting points of stars and use those to orient ourselves in our physical space so that we can navigate from place to place. I used to think that we would go to things. But that island out there was always there, and all you're doing in your place is you're making it come to you. It's the magic of navigation. The ocean swells, the wind, the fishes, the birds that are all out there – you may think that they exist independently, but there is a whole story, a whole dialogue that's happening, and they're telling you where you are if you would just listen."
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According to the passenger on the bus metaphor, the passengers get really rowdy in uncharted territory, and it is our job as the adult self to take the wheel and guide ourselves through the unknown to where we want to go.Â
I wonder if it may be less about knowing who is driving the bus and more about knowing where our bus is in relation to the stars, the moon, and the sun.Â
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Archeologists reflected on the tattoos of the Scythian warriors. They mentioned that it appeared that everyone's first tattoo was the left shoulder, and the more tattoos, the more meaningful or powerful experiences they may have had as warriors.
My first tattoo was on my left shoulder, of two fish swimming around my arm, representing my solar astrological sign. My second tattoo was eighteen years later and on my right arm, signifying strength in vulnerability. It is a replica of a photograph of a snowflake. The crystal is a hexagon shape, which I found in antique French fortress architecture and a honeybee comb. I'm ready for my next tattoo (or a few).
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