Entangled in Touch: 3/4
grasslands, haircuts, birthing, and divine whisperings
Okay, now we’re into the deep stuff. I teeter on the edge of tears in the audio version.
I’ve also decided to split the series into four parts (instead of six). Little longer reading/listening, but more depth in one go.
Listen or read part one here and part two here. And please share along if you think someone would be moved by this!
Sending love from Delft.
-M
When confronted with the sheer quantity of touch that’s gone wrong there’s an impulse to do away with social touch altogether. In the wake of the #metoo movement and COVID-19 lockdowns, hands stay politely in pockets during greetings and hugs are less common. Institutional workers‑ teachers, doctors, spiritual leaders, police officers, and social workers‑ are expected to touch only when professionally necessary. And for good reason. The abuses that have occurred by hands of authority are gut-wrenching. Yet, despite these violations, responding with the drastic diminishment of physical contact leaves us starving for each other.
My mind hops to a lesson from the grasslands, now cracked up and thirsty. They once thrived as herds of large animals trod through and turned up the soil with their hooves. Thousands of creaturely lips met the ground and tore out nutrients. Dung plopped and fertilized, providing a lively site for insects, birds, and varmint. Riverbeds bent in fluid attunement with these creatures. But the near-extinction of large herd animals has left the land untouched. And so it dries up from the lack of connection, unable to receive the moisture it yearns for when the rain finally falls.
Regenerative land practices endeavor to foster vitality once more. While agri-business and corporate land management impose generalized treatment across the globe, those following regenerative principles endeavor to listen to the needs of this space situated in this time. This kind of specificity, however, isn’t locked into shallows of “the now”. It’s a robust recognition that also honours history and gestures towards a thriving future.
Like the land that springs to life under the care of regenerative approaches, I think there’s hopeful possibly in a concept of regenerative touch. This kind of physical connection doesn’t just extract what it wants from another, but enters into an attentive relationship open to discernment and attunement. It does so not like a robotic system laden with sensors, but with feeling and wordless messages of care.
I felt the power of regenerative touch when I started doing free haircuts in Toronto boarding homes some summers ago. These unregulated care homes are one of the stops within Canada’s unofficial revolving-door mental health policy, alongside the street, jail, and the hospital. Residents are often in desperate need of tenderness and protection, but are surrounded by chaos and harm. I visited these homes as a volunteer for over a decade but the rules of the charity forbid me from touching the residents. This boundary helped me feel safe as a young woman in mostly-male homes, but I sometimes wished to hold someone’s hand or give them a hug.
There was one man in particular, Frank, who I truly loved. As soon as he heard I was taking up the buzzer, he met me at his front door each week for a trim. Like many men of his generation, he was always tidy. His shirt was tucked in and his hair was combed to the side. But, like dried grasslands, years of abuse and neglect left his skin with cracks and creases. It was hard to navigate the terrain around his chin and upper lip, especially because he had a weak old tongue that wasn’t any good for pushing out from the inside. When I got nervous that I’d cut him, he’d open his eyes for a moment and silently reassure me. It’s not usually the client encouraging the barber, but that was our dynamic and we managed to get by with only a few scrapes.
Poor and old, Canadian society continually told Frank that he wasn’t worthy of dignified care. Still, Frank held fast to his dignity. I marveled at his resilience and wished that he didn’t need to be so strong. I wish he’d be able to be vulnerable in his weakening body and sleep in a comfortable bed for the rest of his limited life. Not within my means to arrange this for him, I instead took up the razor with as much care as I could. My hands turned to pure love and I was able to say to him: here, now, you are perfect. He lit up under in those moments of affirmation.
My hands reached back into Frank’s memory and reminded him of the Universe’s first message to him. The same one we all receive. At the beginning of our worldly lives we are held wholly and completely while working on the great project of being. Before we can hear and long before we can use language, we receive the Universe’s whispering: “you are whole, you are whole, you are whole”. The great divine establishes this embodied memory in our deepest roots so we may seek it out for protection when earthly life tries to fracture us.
Then we make our passage to the outside and I wonder about the ways our journey shapes our lives. Perhaps the vaginal canal gives us one last totalizing embrace of reassurance. A painful gift, but a gift nonetheless.
After our daughter felt this existential squeeze she swooshed into a pool. The midwife intercepted by husband’s hands that set to grab his firstborn from the water, giving her time to unfurl all on her own in a warm airless embrace. It was only a few seconds, but they were infinitely deep and my motherly wisdom tells me that they’ll shape my daughter’s life in ways unknown.
Our son, who in his eagerness to meet us didn’t give enough warning time to set up the pool, burst and slid out of me unto the bedroom floor. I pulled him to me, trying to recreate the embrace of the womb with my body. His spindley fingers began clawing my breasts in search for nourishment. Their poking and prodding told my body it was time to release the colostrum.
How different their passage was from mine. Born by caesarian section, I was hoisted into the big airspace by strange hands that would never become familiar. Instead of a final reassuring squeeze saying “here you are, my girl, don’t forget”, I got sporadic points of pressure calling my awareness in multiple directions. My husband and I joke that this is why my spatial awareness is a bit off. Generally, I manage to be contained, but when I’m tired, anxious, or silly I start to run into chairs and drop things. He says I’m “out over the front of my skiis”. I say I’m seeping out of my skin.
Once we’re out of the womb, we’re still held. The world just holds us differently than a mother’s body. Our very embodiment means that we’re always in haptic relationship with our environment. We live in touch. To me, acknowledging this foundational, unshirkable interconnection raises important moral questions: how should I touch and how should I be touched? What do I want my body to say to others?
Touch is a powerful mode of communication. It reveals what we dare not speak. Lovers’ bodies tangled and trembling say more than a poet’s verse. A kick to the stomach screams with hate. And though we may try to repress them, the beliefs and biases at our cores always find their way out to our extremities. At the collective level, patterns of institutional touch reveal that some are deemed worthy of tender care, while some are deemed worthy of being shoved and choked.
These thoughts pressed on me when we took my eight-day old son to the hospital for a fever. I melted into hysteria watching his little body touched by people who didn’t love him. Their hands moved efficiently, guided by values of safety and precision, but there was no reverent care. Watching them, I remembered a thought from Arthur Frank’s book “The Renewal of Generosity”: every touch matters, every touch affects you.
That night I stripped my shirt off, undressed my boy and slept with him on my chest. I nodded obediently but remained unmoved when night nurse told me he should sleep in his crib. As we seeped into one another, skin-to-skin, I was able to gather myself from the day’s outpouring. Then when the staff arrived in the morning, I calmly said that no one was to touch him unless medically necessary, and even then they must be soft and slow. As we waited between tests I silently told him that he was loved by swaying my thumb back and forth on his cheek. I wordlessly explained that he was protected by wrapping my arms around his tiny body.
Years before exchanging words, we speak the language of the body. I want my children to know they can find safety in my love, so I nestle this message into their earliest memories by the way I hold them, adding a message of security atop the Universe’s original affirmation.
I wait until their newborn limbs flail in the right direction before guiding them into their diapers and clothes. When my toddler clamps her legs shut, I wait. I play. I ask silly questions. Eventually she giggles and opens wide for me to put the diaper cream on. My words about the importance of consent matter little if I’ve been prying her legs apart since she’s been born.
My children aren’t just learning through my direct contact. Their little eyes follow me around, watching me speak to the world through my movements. Busy with a mental to-do list, there are times when I carelessly stomp out to the garden, tear some herbs, and toss them into a hot stew without so much as a “thank you”. In a rush, I’ve pushed our dog to the side with my knee just because he was asking, in his own way, for some cheese. And with a curse, I’ve shoved unfolded laundry into drawers, blaming it for heaping into a small mountain.
My movements are quickened by an abstract and omnipresent sense of scarcity. Capitalist ideology has planted a fear within me that there’s not enough time, space, money, attention, or good will to go around. So I hurry to stay just ahead of… ahead of what, exactly? Destitution, despair, or disaster, I suppose. Unconsciously, these fears that are conjured from the real and the imaginary guide how I physically interact with the world.
The worldview I was raised in was hellbent on breaking the universe into graspable bits and my inattentive ripping, tossing, and shoving show it. Goodness, what do my offspring see me telling the more-than-human we share a home with? Where is the care and attention I practice at the diaper changing table?
What they witness, I think, is a mother swinging between multiple ways of being in the world. It’s what I saw in my own parents, too. Entrenched in the modernist node of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism, they still dared to commune with the trees and slow down enough to receive the beauty in the everyday.
I endeavor to soften the fragmentations set upon me by cultural ancestry, so that I may ease into the gooiness of my entanglements. My son and daughter feel how my adrenalin dissipates as I sway from one foot to the other, sense the ground beneath me and thank it for support. There will likely come a time when they, like me, will wish for a “normal” mother. One who didn’t close her eyes in public or ask the grocery store lemons which one of them would like to come home. But for now, they don’t question my appeals for help or little chit-chats because the aliveness of the world is obvious to them…
That’s all for now! The final installment will be shared April 18th, as I’m enjoying a family holiday next week (and need to pack) <3
This thinking is new to me, and honestly very helpful. Thank you.
Maddy you have truly again touched my heart. What an amazing gift you have shared thank you for your kindness and courage