22nd September 2021
An extraordinary thing happened to me.
I was walking along the canal when I saw a duck dive so it was half submerged and half above water – bum up.
And in that split second I KNEW exactly how it felt. Not emotionally but kinaesthetically. I had a total experience of knowing it’s shape, how much it weighed, what it was like to touch and how it’s body felt in and out of the deep. It was one of those unexplainable moments.
Later I realised my lockdown projects of keeping (and so handling) chickens, wild swimming and trying to be in my own body were all ingredients of this withchery.
There is more.
My sister and I have decided to read all my mum’s books. My mum loved reading and always had a book in her hand, or splayed half open on the arm of the chair where she was sitting.
In holding a ‘mum book’ out in front of me I can see my own hands and also slip into another consciousness where I can simultaneously experience her hands and know the feel of them around this same book. Part of what I see is heredity but there is another Knowing of her shape and sense of touch that I can trace on top of, or under, my own.
Later I realised my experience of caring for my mum in her end of life journey meant I knew the intimacies of her body in a more tactile way than I ever had before. Her skin, her joints, the weight and texture of her landscapes – the physical act of caring bringing a tangibility to our continuing bond.
I wonder about the impact of a year, in which most people had no, or very little touch, on our embodied empathy. The collective context of the pandemic has lent itself to online sharing and temporary communities of individual experience – loss and grief have been real points of connection for me and many.
But I wonder about the physical body, the vessel that holds the heart and spiritual self, it’s potential for us to make connections beyond our busy everyday consciousness. The intimacy of this raw material that knows that you, a book, a bird, a hand, love, are all one in the universe.
The words ‘feeling’ and ‘touching’ have multiple meanings and that makes a new kind of sense as I realise anew that what I experience physically has a relationship with what I experience emotionally – even across space and time.
We all transfer, imagine and recreate touch we have felt.
We can feel the shape of water.
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