There is a primate social activity, probably the best that we could do for each other if we still did it ourselves. They call it grooming and I guess it is essential if you are furred all over as most primates are. They just decide and start to do it, looking in all the crevices and between all the hairs, picking out that which does not belong. They pay exquisite attention. The one being groomed sits quite still.
Sometimes in AA meetings I will touch someone’s back and do some “grooming”. I love doing that. In choir at the local community college, they would chain up sometimes, though the age difference never allowed me to join in on that one. I even have a massage table at home. At one point I was going to get a license. I realized that I was not really in love with touching enough though. It still matters who I touch and I don’t think that is quite the case with true massage therapists. On the other hand, I work with energy too.
Recently a friend blogged on this, saying we do not touch each other enough. Can I have an “Amen”?
Fellow Traveller On The Path
The last time you rolled
I clung to your fur, looking
out for the things you
pick up doing that,
like the weeds, seeds, dung, dirt
and the detritus
of your longer romps
with the one who gave us this
strange, wonderful life.
June 14, 2009 10:05 AM
Contraction
1 week ago
This is so true. It is not a reflex for me to touch people as I grew up in a very nontactile environment, however, I've trained myself in certain circumstances to touch people. It does an amazing thing, for both the giver and the receiver.
ReplyDeleteAnd then I think to one situation in particular where a certain man touches me, and at first I felt close in the touch, and now I feel violated, as though he is trying to own me, translate something in the so called innocent touch. I don't know how to tell this man, who is virtually a stranger (because of his confusing intention) to stop. A simple gesture, touching my arm, which makes my skin crawl.
I touch my children constantly, lay on them my love.
xo
erin
(Your poem today was welcome. It is confusing sometimes to be. Thank you~)
ReplyDeleteErin, that is of course the other side of touch, and I have felt it too. There was a woman who obviously intended to devour me (this even though she may have not meant that at all but it is what that felt like to me). She may have been a victim of her own clumsiness. She hugged me and stuck her nose in the crook of my neck and snuffed me in loudly. I thought, "Vampire!!". That was the only time I ever felt stalked. I saw her again years later and she seemed quite harmless. This woman was rich too.
ReplyDeleteThis is a mystery to me, how someone can pervert the simple touch like that, but also I have been accused of predation before, even when it wasn't true, or at least not true the way they took it. Or perhaps worse than that, I was accused and in the accusation used as a device in the manipulation of another, set up for it. That was the favorite interpretation that a couple of my friends took at the time.
The illnesses under which some of us suffer are profound. Perversion of touch is one of the saddest. I love watching the closeness of children and parents, and find the innocence of fathers and children especially poignant.