Skin
A new friend asked me yesterday, “what is your favorite part of your body?”
I pondered for a few moments and said, “my skin.”
It feels so much, makes so much possible, and allows me to interact with the world – to feel the world.
Our skin is the largest organ in our bodies. It covers us from head to toe with different textures, thickness, and innervation. Our skin protects us and contains us, and it heals itself.
Pause for a moment here to appreciate the wonder that is your skin. Stroke the back of your hand or the sides of your face, offering some gratitude to this miracle of nature.
Our in-person programs at the Verdant Collective invite and involve touch. Certainly, everything that we offer, whether in-person or online, invites the participants to touch themselves. Skin to skin touch.
Touch is a fundamental human need, and this year of social distancing has left many of us skin hungry. Even before the pandemic, we were a touch-starved society. This starvation contributes to our disembodiment and our disconnection from ourselves, and the human and other-than-human worlds, leaving us precariously unaware of our belonging. Literally getting in touch with the world – whether it’s with your toes, your Jade plant, an animal companion, an ant, another human, a tree, the dirt, the snow, the water in the ditch you pass over on your dog walk – can remind you of your inherent belonging. The contact between you and this other being an indication of your capacity to be in relationship with the wild, wonderful world around you.
This morning, I was introduced to a new poem, all about skin. The synchronicity made me smile, and I thought I would share it with you here. You can read it, or you can listen to me read it to below.
Two Countries
By Naomi Shihab Nye
Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.
Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers–silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.
