Skin Deep Stories

Let’s get a little more specific, a little more intimate. 

Let’s get down to the level of skin.

One month ago, I reached a hand down into a patch of vinca minor and caught a glimpse of a jagged green leaf. Oh no, I thought.

Now I have poison ivy. I’ve wanted to claw it off, freeze it or burn it, anything to make it quit itching. It’s been a month of inflamed rashes and prednisone and this skin I’m in is almost healed.

Although it might scar this time, my skin hasn’t failed me. 

This skin has been through a bunch, just like yours, but also nothing like yours.

Photo by Bonnie Kittle on Unsplash

One time, while lying in savasana—that’s corpse pose—a yoga instructor guided us in considering every part of our body, from toe to crown. Everywhere I went my body remembered pain. A horse stepped on that toe once. I skinned my shin on a bike pedal—there’s the scar. Another one stretches long across my lower abdomen. And so on, my skin told stories of its suffering, its ability to break and to heal, to groan and to ripple with pleasure, to be made new and yet remember. 

Other creatures shed their skin all at once, leaving behind a shell of their former selves as they slither or fly away. That’s it. End of chapter. 

Instead, we lose bits and pieces of ourselves everyday, slough off every cell over the course of seven years until we’ve been reborn. Our cycle of tired cells replenishes and renews, but somehow the skin keeps the past composed in scar tissue. 

Skin holds our particular stories incarnate. We survived this and this and this. Don’t forget it.

Monday Meditation:

What stories does your skin carry?

Travel the course of your one God-given and sacred body. Consider the scars, the crevices, and the bumps.

Among the first things to form in the womb, your skin has been the container that has held you for as long as you have been you. It’s the grand buttresses, soaring ceilings, and fine tapestries decorating God’s temple.

Forgive it for wrinkling or stretching or freckling; your skin is just doing its job to keep all of your marvelous parts in place, to make manifest the memories of what has made you.

Sit with your skin a minute—listen to the stories it has to tell you, and then bless this dermatological miracle. Bless this treasure chest of your endurance, your resilience, your strength. Bless this unique mosaic of swirls and lines and prints. It is singularly yours, and you, and you are glorious. 

Tune in to the podcast episode above for a little bonus reading, “Hymn of Skin,” a poem from my first book, Pruning Burning Bushes (order copies here).