Entangled in Touch: 4/4
tomatoes, Big Foot, smooth tech, and grace
The final installment of a deep dive on the sense of touch. The series is based on years of academic research, but instead of relying on theory, I share everything I know through story.
If you haven’t read or listened to the others, here is Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.
Enjoy!
I’d imagined that my children would be soft-handed with other living things, but babies and toddlers are scrappy little beasts. They scratch and pull and sometimes bite. It’s nothing short of maternal magic that keeps me from defensive violence when my girl rips at my hair and claws at my eyes. I tell her, “Mommy likes to be touched like this” and rub her hands gently across my face. She listens and begins to pet me.
Our baby boy, however, threatens to undo much of this learning. He pulls her curls and grabs her glasses before scrunching into a ball, hoping to get her in his mouth. “Mama!” she cries, eyes wild with confusion. I stand frozen, overwhelmed by philosophical information. “How much a toddler can understand about the concepts of intentionality and responsibility?” I wonder. I decide that the lecture can be postponed and quickly remove his surprisingly strong hands from her head.
The summer before her second birthday, my daughter could be found wandering naked in the garden. Her father lined the veggie patches with “sacrificial tomatoes”, knowing that two little mitts would soon snatch the fruits. Despite this preparation, we were still shocked by the degree of destruction. A bucket was quickly filled with bitten-then-discarded tomatoes. Not a hint of remorse was shown!
This was far from what I’d envisioned. I pictured my daughter and I squatting low, chit-chatting with the plants while I showed her how to feel the fruits for ripeness. I imagined her learning to move through the garden with discerning movement, carefully stepping across the soil while gliding her hands across the plants sending messages of respect.
It's a romantic picture, isn’t it? Oh, but it’s too sweet. Too pure. Too innocent. Being in harmony with nature doesn’t mean leaving it untouched. The grasslands don’t abide by this and neither do our bodies. Not only do we need to eat, but our very embodiment means we take up some space.
Sometimes I find this aspect of my nature hard to bear. Once in a meadow of wildflowers I swayed with the colourful collection of petaled bodies, smiling with them towards the sun. But soon I froze, foot hovering at the edge of a down step. I was seized by the thought that every movement I took destroyed the life beneath me. No matter how light I endeavor to be the nature of my embodied self means that I have to step, lay, or sit. I’m a squasher, through and through.
Something akin to survivor’s guilt began to bubble in my gut as I tried to lightly hurry off the grass. Seeking refuge on the sidewalk, I see now, is telling of what I deem worthy of protection. Is the concrete not alive, too?
My pursuit of innocence is also revealing. I may advocate for the acceptance of moral ambiguity in my work and in conversation, but an underlining desire to be morally pure propels me nonetheless. I can’t shake the absolutist and mathematical ethics of my cultural history and academic training. Such thinking renders ethics into calculation, where I’m x bad because one of my steps results in x amount of destruction. This formulaic approach is frightfully popular now with the movement of effective altruism, which relies on a mechanistic worldview that renders life measurable.
But a quick look to the more-than-human world shows that life on earth offers no straight lines or tidy categories to sort beings into. We humans, like all the other life on the planet, bubble over every container we set upon ourselves.
A meditation into our haptic connections shows that our embodied selves are blessedly more complex than binaries allow. We’re not just stompers; we’re miraculous sites of generation! We make love, cook dinner, play jokes, and offer support. We spit and spew, curse and push. All of these actions pulse with life entangled and send out ripples of unknowable effect.
I’m not just a clunky Big Foot acting unidirectionally on the vulnerable grass. Does the ground not come up to meet me also? Isn’t it mightier than I, holding my body up without strain? If I widen my spatial awareness beyond the exact site of my foot on the land, then I feel the Earth’s core support me as I, quite remarkably, stick out the top of a planet orbiting a sun in the multiverse.
Human movement on the planet increasingly follows an all-or-nothing patterning. People travel across the globe via air travel, while their day-to-day movements become smaller and smaller. Many were already using online shopping and services before the pandemic, but the lockdown years quickly integrated it into people’s regular habits. Instead of heading out to a store or market, I can have food delivered my doorstep simply by swiping and tapping my thumb on a smooth screen.
The difference in movement and, therefore, touch is profound. Digital technologies are designed to ensure a “smooth user experience” and after a few uses of the same application, my thumb can swiftly add items to the digital shopping cart. While the couch and I may be in a warm embrace, it’s still a radical reduction in the diversity of touch from my feet hitting the sidewalk, the air brushing my skin, my hands grasping the door handle and cart, and so on.
When ordering online my eyes zip through stock images of food and I click on what’s needed for my meal plan. I only veer off track when a carefully placed recommendation successfully nudges me into purchasing another item. In-person, however, my hands discern and help me adapt the week’s menu to accommodate the gift of nearly-ripe avocados or presence of perfectly firm grapes.
People selling digital technologies use a long-standing narrative that x technology frees up time for meaningful pursuits and more connection. In the time saved from ordering food online, for example, I might go for a walk in nature or donate an hour’s work to a climate change non-profit. But this kind of mathematical thinking treats time, meaning, and connection as things to be parceled up and organized optimally. But we don’t gain connection via disconnection.
Of this I am sure: disconnection begets disconnection. Connection begets connection. The ways we take up the mundane and ordinary are how we take up the larger issues. How we treat the universe is how we treat the smallest of things. This is the magic of fractals, where seemingly complex systems repeat the same patterns at every scale.
We might turn our honest attention inwards, then, for insights on how we’re doing out in the world. For all the thinking I’ve done on touch and all the shifts I’ve made when connecting to others, I should now ask: how is it that I touch myself?
I’ve pinched, squeezed, lifted, stretched, shifted, pulled, scratched, massaged, poked and prodded. I’ve pleasured, wiped, scratched, rubbed and primped.
If touch is a form of non-verbal communication, what have I said to myself? Have I said, “Thank you” or “You’re beautiful and everything that gets me through the day”?
Sometimes. But not enough.
I inhaled the sexism in the air around me and it settled somewhere within. It’s guided my fingertips across my skin and said, “be smaller, be perky, be smooth and without pores”.
As a teenager I’d investigate my body by squeezing the flesh, searching for a truth that would only be revealed under pressure. I would pinch inch-by-inch along my thighs, then feel a pang of terror when I inevitably found the bumps of cellulite. Sure, it could only be seen in particular lighting and in an unnatural stance, but it was there, laying beneath the facade as some deep horrible truth. My stomach tightened with shame and I spent years doing what all ashamed people do: hiding. I’d pull the outside of my thighs down and inwards when I sat and then, hopefully, cover them up with a sweater or napkin.
Some years later I was at a yoga retreat and the instructor asked us to say to our bodies: “I love you. I am listening to you.” My eyes welled with tears as I repeated the words. It was like being placed before someone I’d wronged and had since been avoiding. “I’m so sorry” tumbled out of my mouth. I felt the pang of shame for all the times I’d neglected my body or treated it unkindly.
Instead of putting me on trial my body gave a forgiving shrug and said, “You’ve always been forgiven. I’m glad you’re here now.” Under this gaze of grace, any shame I carried melted away.
And, you know what’s great? Amends needn’t be small or timid. Atoning needn’t be serious. It can be easy and full and boisterous. In the years I’ve been touching my body with loving recognition, my hair grows lush, my nails strengthen, my bowels move; there is blood gushing from my heart as she’s finally given space to do her work with pride.
Life. Life. Life!
My body is as quick to forgive as the land. It’s ready, always, to sprout and be full. All it needs is attention that doesn’t hasten or bargain but is soft and without agenda.
And isn’t that what we all need? To be held and not fixed?
Maybe that’s what my sourdough needs. I take a deep breath, roll my shoulders down from my ears and mutter, “Be brave. Do not fear the dough.”
Disconnection begets disconnection. Absolutely. How we do the small things, we do the big things. How we think moment to moment, is how the world moves in its grand shifts. Yes, this is so, and you have given us beautiful examples of this in this four part series on touch. Your articulation of the complexity between what we dream/fantasize to be so and the reality of living in the real, is so familiar. What mother, deprived of sleep and feeling her body caught in an endless onslaught, has only just managed not to smack a child who with surprising force simply lifts their head from the breast and brings tears to one's eyes from the pain? I remember that feeling well, as one of my children was both fanatically strong or clumsy and was forever hurting me unexpectedly - and always so sorry afterward, even as a baby.
And of course, sometimes mothers don't manage not to hit their children and as a society we condemn this behaviour, without, I think, the tender compassion needed to tend the mother. Binaries don't work at any level, and emotionally and ethically they only add to the weight of our already overloaded self examination.
Thank you, Madelaine, for your courageous conversations that force us to re examine all there is, and all there might yet be.
Dear Maddy I feel touched and moved and prodded to learn and grow in you wave. You help me be brave