TOUCHSCAPE

It is not just the air that touches us, although its touch is constant. Our body touches every chair it sits on, every piece of floor or ground it stands on, every surface it lies on, every piece of clothing in contact with the skin, every tool our hands wield, every thing we attempt to grasp, lift, propel, receive, or deliver. And perhaps most importantly, we touch each other in myriad ways, sometimes automatic, sometimes perfunctory, sometimes sensuous, sometimes romantic, sometimes loving, sometimes aggressive, sometimes unfeeling, sometimes with anger. Depending on how we are touched, we can feel loved, accepted, and valued, or ignored, disrespected, assaulted. We touch through handshakes, a hand on another’s shoulder, an arm around another, through pats, hugs, lifts, embraces, kisses, caresses, dances, massages, and, usually in games, where such touch is regulated by different sets of rules than our normal social code, through colliding, tackling, checking, grappling, even kicking and punching. And there are times when, not in games, we might be either touched or touching another in ways that are unkind, even menacing, or worse. Of course, increasingly there are laws regulating that kind of touch in society for the protection of our basic rights of safety and bodily sovereignty as individuals.

But however we touch and whatever we touch, inanimate or animate, plant, animal or human being, stranger, client, colleague, friend, child, parent, lover, we can touch either mindfully or mindlessly. And in any and every moment, we have a chance to know directly, through awareness, how we ourselves are being touched, and how we are feeling and what we are sensing from moment to moment as a consequence of both how we are touching and how we are being touched. This is the landscape of touch, the touchscape, if you will, the sensory field of ever-reciprocal direct somatic contact between ourselves and the world, which we can feel, whether superficial or deep, across any and every square inch of our bodies.

As I sit here cross-legged in this moment writing at my desk on the floor, I am aware of the sensations coming from my butt in contact with my meditation cushion (zafu), and from the outside lengths of my lower legs, stretching from knees to ankles and upturned feet, draped one in front of the other, resting on the fabric-enclosed cotton batting (zabuton) that cushions them from the floor. I am also aware of the touch sensations coming from the upper surfaces of my feet, which are also in contact with this padding. These are the only parts of my body at present in contact with what is beneath me, holding me up, even as gravity is continually pulling every part of the body toward the floor, completely balanced by the repose of the posture itself.

The dominant sensation at the moment is one of heaviness in the lower part of the buttocks extending just a bit into the upper thighs in back, where they are absorbing the pressure of the upper body pushing down into the well-stuffed zafu. The pelvis is tilted forward and the lumbar spine as a consequence curves in lordosis toward the abdomen so that the greatest pressure is on the bones lying beneath the gluteus maximi. There is a sense of contraction in the left knee more than the right, as the left leg, foot, and heel are closer to the perineum than the right leg, which lies beyond the left one in contact with the zabuton below it. The feeling of contraction gives a sense of the knee being somewhat congested in this moment. There are sensations of tingling and pulsing, almost throbbing, much more in this knee than in the other one. There is also the softness of the padding against the outer edges of the lower legs and the tops of the feet. I notice that some of the sensations in the legs and buttocks are from the contact with what my lower body is sitting on in this posture, but others, like the sensations in the knee, extend beyond this physical contact and include sensations that are simply associated with the body’s awareness of itself and where all the various regions of the body are in relationship to each other and in relationship to the space it is occupying. This is part of the sensory experience of proprioception, from the Latin, proprius, meaning “one’s own.”

The rest of my body is touching only the air surrounding it, except for the contact of the heels of my hands with the laptop’s hand rest, and the palm-side ends of my fingers pressing into the keys as I type at this close-to-the-floor table that serves as a desk when sitting in this fashion. Sensations in the heels of the hands include warmth (the laptop is giving off heat), the smoothness and the hardness of the surface they are lying on, and their own intrinsic heaviness. The heels of the hands, supporting the weight of the arms, feel anchored and weighty. The fingers, flexed in the customary position on the keyboard, feel light, energetic, and pulsing.

Of course, touch is not segregated from the other senses, so I am also aware in this moment of the soundscape bathing me by way of the air that bathes my skin and enters my lungs with every contraction of my diaphragm as I sit here. And I am touched by it, but in a different way than the direct somatosensory contact of the touchscape. It feels somewhat less tangible, more disembodied, until I realize that it is my whole body that is absorbing the sounds and not just my ears, that as I pay careful attention, the physical vibrations of the sounds are being felt in some cases right down to my bones.

I am also simultaneously aware of what is continually presenting itself to the eyes, what we could call the sightscape, the screen upon which these words are appearing—thirty years ago, in the era of electric typewriters, such an experience would truly have been considered science fiction—and beyond the screen, the room, and the early-morning sunlight through windows to my right illuminating just a few vertical surfaces, the back of the desk chair, a bit of the desk, a red loose-leaf book stuffed vertically next to the printer, the sun’s own calligraphy—reflected shadows of a few leaves from the giant Norway maple outside—magically appearing on the vertical support for the shelving above the printer. I look again after a few minutes have passed and it is all different. The light on the desk gone. The shadow calligraphy is cast from a slightly different angle. The leaves and stems are now more defined, and flatter.

Ashley Montague, in his classic book Touch: The Human Significance of the Skin, observed that the word “touch” has the distinction of the longest entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. That means that it is longer even than the entry for the word “love.” And, if we stop and think about it, it may not strike us as all that surprising. For where would love be without touch? Touch is so basic to life. (In high school biology class, when we looked at, poked, and probed cells and small animals under a microscope, this property was coldly and clinically referred to as “irritability.”) We are embedded in the world and know it through all the senses, but the most basic one, the least specialized, the most global, has got to be touch, which transpires across the membrane of skin that contains us, defines our body, and differentiates its interior milieu from the outer, the world beyond its bounds. Before we were born, we all grew into our body and our being within the living environment of another being and her body, bounded within other membranes where we were held apart and yet somehow not apart as well, not quite two yet, not even separate bodies—containment and touch at their most basic. We know all this, yet somehow often forget or downplay the utter miracle and lived mystery of it. We have all participated in it from one side, and mothers from both.

We are nurtured through touch, nurturing touch, loving touch, loving containment, holding, before we are born and after. While latched on and nursing, babies usually feel around for the other nipple and hold on to it, touching and in touch with one through the lips and tongue, with the other through tiny perfect fingers, completing circuits of love and continual nurturing, nourishing connection, a sustenance well beyond the milk itself. When carried, babies are continually held and therefore touched, in contact with the larger bodies of their parents and caretakers. And when they sleep with their parents in their bed, the physical contact continues while sleeping, wrapped in the same warm and loving cocoon.

Metaphorically speaking, we can be out of touch, lose touch, be touched (as in the head), and feel touched (as in when our hearts are moved). We can not touch our food, put the touch on someone for money, feel a touch of envy or sadness, add a touch of paprika, have a touch of the flu, let the candlelight provide just the right touch, be told not to touch anything, touch off an uproar, touch upon something in conversation, touch up the scratches on our car, add finishing touches to the flower arrangements, and touch base with someone.

The sense of touch is actually, from a neurological point of view, a number of different senses all subsumed under the same word. Sensing the pressure of contact is one. Sensing the temperature of contact is another. Sensing contact that is so intense it causes us pain is yet another, as is sensing a caress so loving it gives us pleasure.

Another dimension of the sense of touch involves our ability to sense the body inwardly, to know, for instance, where your hands are without moving them or looking at them, or what the carriage of the body is in any moment. As we have already noted, this sensory capacity we all have is called proprioception, the sense of knowing where the body is spatially, orienting within the field of the body and sensing its movements and intentions.^* Proprioception is so basic that we almost never accord it any status in awareness. It is taken completely for granted. But as we shall see in The Healing Power of Mindfulness, Part 1, loss of proprioception through sensory nerve damage is utterly catastrophic. One no longer knows or feels that one is, so to speak, a resident of the body, inhabiting a willing universe of potential intentional activity within the larger world. One’s hands and legs are no longer one’s own. They are foreign objects, with no value or utility. They cannot be moved in anything like the usual way. One’s connection with them and with the whole of the body is severed. It is the ultimate being out of touch. Happily, this condition is extremely rare.

But being unaware of proprioception and being instrumentally out of touch with our own body is, sadly, extremely common. Luckily, in this case, there is an enormous amount we can do to recover this miraculous dimension of lived experience instantly, for it is never far away, always closer than close. We are only out of touch because we ignore what is already here. If we drop the ignoring, we come instantly to our senses because the senses are already and always delivering. That is their nature. We only need to awaken to them.

After rain after many days without rain,

it stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees,

and the dampness there, married now to gravity,

falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground

where it will disappear—but not, of course, vanish

except to our eyes. The roots of the oaks will have their share,

and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss;

a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole’s tunnel;

and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,

will feel themselves being touched.

MARY OLIVER, “Lingering in Happiness”