Touching the World
"Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder...She called in her soul to come and see." ~Zora Neale Hurston
I’ve been calling in my soul to come and see the world this month. That feels like what this project in delight is really about-calling in my awareness, calling in my soul.
I’m traveling now, out in the world with my family. It is both easier and harder to pay attention. We’re in a small car together, roaming through West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina. Being together is both delightful and challenging. Yet, the moment I call back my senses I am fueled toward delight through gratitude. And so the project continues.
Delight has been reaching over the car seat to take my daughter’s hand (something we’ve done since she was a tiny human), touching my hand to water from the incredible Cathedral Falls, feeling my sons strong arms around my shoulders, laying my head against my husband’s cheek, feeling the stones of an ancient cave like smooth plastic under my fingertips.
In her book Life in Five Senses, Gretchen Rubin writes, “human touch may help to lower stress, blood pressure, and pain; boost our immune system and mood; and help us sleep better…appropriate touch helps to foster feelings of gratitude, trust, and sympathy.”
This past week, I needed to foster all of this. As emotions heightened at one point of the trip, I discovered how essential delight in touch really was. In fact, paying attention to not only appropriate and valued human touch but also the familiar touch of a blanket from my home, of my yoga mat, of the touch of tree bark and moss in nature, brought me back into my body so quickly and efficiently that my mood shifted, gratitude ran through me again: I was at home again in my heart.
This is it, friends: how do we arrive at home in our own heart? Because it is there that we can connect to the heart home of another. I am writing this from Memphis where I spent the day yesterday at the Civil Rights Museum. It was a powerful experience—standing in the place where Martin Luther King Jr breathed his last breaths, facing our history and realizing that so much hasn’t yet changed. I held onto my children, I purposely reached out to shake the hand of a stranger, I made sure to feel my feet in the streets of this city. What else can I do, I wondered long as I walked through these streets, to connect to the heart of so many others?
Touch, my friends, can be a way of igniting the imagination, of healing, of connection, of bringing ourselves into a more deeply embodied state. Pay attention, close your eyes, place your hands on your heart and feel yourself deeply aligned right there. Delight in the beat of your breath and pulse. Delight in the touch of your own hand, in the ability of touch through your fingertips.
In this week ahead, I’ll be focusing on delight in taste—a sense that has been thoroughly engaged by so many different foods this past week. I am longing for the taste of simplicity and to delight in the ways that life comes in through my mouth.