The effort it takes to communicate with words…
A single picture is worth a thousand of them; and a single touch is worth a thousand pictures. If we have practiced all with good attention, then words become the lowest form of communication, they are heart and mind thrown at a distance to perhaps be caught, perhaps be dropped: certainly they paint only one-thousandth of a picture, or one millionth of a touch.
I have through my years engaged in any number of physical practices, and with each passing year have found greater sensitivity and nuance in the smallest movements. Not because mastery of a movement form is something for which I am especially gifted — I can think of innumerable athletes or performers who leave my small feats far below their heights — but because skillfulness increases when anything is repeated with awareness. The most minute changes become moments of disproportionate excitement: “Oh! Did you feel that!” Perhaps because as we age, the newness of living decreases, and these small wonders take on the significance of the first time we saw a star-filled sky for what it was, or the first time we held another’s hand with affection, the first time an airplane took us through the clouds, the first kiss.
It is with indelible gratitude that I receive these new insights the world has granted. They are so small. Have you ever been sitting quietly in the springtime grasses — maybe your body was drinking in the sunlight, or the warm breeze had softened your winter tension — and suddenly a brightly colored butterfly puffs into your field of view? Maybe raking the leaves fallen from last year, and with one pull of the tines, a crocus or iris is uncovered. The sound of the first raindrops on the roof. It’s all the same to me — it’s all the language of touch, all the graces of the world touching me through the senses, unprocessed by words or symbols, impartial in its gift of presence, yours and its own.
This past weekend I returned to a practice which had always provided me with so much sweetness, so much information. Its richness stems from the fact that it is a practice with other humans — with the world which surrounds us we coexist, but with our own species we co-create, so that the touch of a finger does not meet the foreign language of a leaf, or the weight of a stone; instead it meets the whorl of a finger, the finger’s warmth, the blood that flows along the arm to meet it, the pressure and its intent. Because we share so much of the same experience of living and dying, and because we cocreate and procreate, in a finger’s touch we meet the longing and the fullness, what has been gained and lost in a life, translated into the electric moment of nerves meeting nerves, and the race of knowledge from one mind experiencing the world to another.
We know, for example, in a single moment if the person we embrace will soften to meet us, or if anxieties or tensions will prevent him or her from feeling our touch. In a glance we see that a glance is returned. The picture speaks a thousand words, and the touch, a million.
The most difficult training is in shared contact. Only upper-level practitioners of martial arts are allowed into the sparring circle, or shown the mysteries of Push Hands. It is not that it is inherently more difficult than solo practice; in fact, it may in some ways be easier, because you are given a mirror to reflect your advances and your mistakes. But without doubt it is only a fruitful exercise when the practitioner has gained enough inner awareness and knowledge of how their energies play, that they are able to distinguish between their touch and the other’s touch. It is this sensitivity of movement in oneself that permits the dance of bodies — in the kung fu hall or the yoga sanctuary, in the dance jam or in the bedroom — to be one of the joy of exploration, of meeting, instead of one of dissolution and merging.
Heaven knows, merging is pleasurable. It was built that way.
But the language of touch is one where two stories are spoken together, and two energies which by nature are completely distinct from one another, move toward and recognize themselves. I wrote some months ago about my first experience as a participant in a Contact Improvisation dance “jam”. It may not have been representative, since the “jam” idea implies some of the calisthenic joy of being embodied that I have found in the regional hiking club: the spirited movement does not always yield to self-awareness, and rarely to a heightened awareness of the environment or the others around you. That physical expression is more akin to shouting than to speech, a far cry from melody, a heavy hand that will not feel nuance.
My first “jam” was unexpected and for that reason all the more delightful. I heard there was to be some music in the community building, and talked my way into it, only to find that it was free-form movement meant as an exploration of others’ energies. Meaning (for those of you who immediately polarize intimacy to mean sexuality) that there was no specific choreography, and no need to dance with one person, or another, or anyone at all. By looking inside to find the center, you would automatically, at some point, feel yourself in proximity to another… reach out… touch hands, perhaps… and dance to the music.
The story began with the first touch. All the words I write tonight, and tomorrow and the next week, would not cover the beautiful entirety of a person felt through a single series of movements. Did she draw away or bring her energy in? Was he tightly held or relaxed? More intriguing, more invaluable, how did you respond? What did you offer with your contact, with your story? How long did you remain with this dancer, or with another? How did your energy and response differ when you moved from one partner to another? Amazing. Like standing at the ocean for the first time and becoming aware of its majesty. Like climbing the last steps to the summit of a mountain, and looking out from its height over ridge upon ridge upon ridge of land, farther than the eye can perceive.
On that first evening of dance, I was fortunate enough to be in a group with two or three incredibly gifted dancers — gifted not in their acrobatic abilities, but in their skill at speaking with their hands and movements, and in that refinement to listen equally well to their partner. When you have studied long years how the weight of your body is held in the palm of the earth, and how the line of strength moves up the heel through the leg, through the hip and groin to the belly, accumulating and swelling from the belly to fill the abdomen, being lit with the fire of the heart, sighing through the larynx and throat, trickling down to the finger tips and bubbling up to the crown of the head… when you have lived in your body long enough with attention that it becomes an instrument for which you find some small skill in playing… then the music you create can find and harmonize with the music of another. You are able to listen, knowing that you don’t always have to speak to be heard.
That is what broke my heart and broke me open: the incredible beauty of shared language, in 5 minutes of intimate, non-sexual yet intensely sensual dance. To say without saying, “Here I am”, and know without thinking, “There you are”; to decide without words that you, or she, are taking leave. To accept with knowledge deeper than cerebral, that you are letting him or her go…
… as the fingers soften their touch, trace the last contours of the fingerprint as if writing the last words of a story, hold to the furthest ridge as though to the last syllable, share a last glance that chases that spark of information around a circle from fingers to hearts to heads and back out through the eyes, then tah! the stories diverge.
Everyone you have touched with this depth of feeling is taken into your cells. The memory of sweet and intentional touch, through dance or though meditation, is balm to the world’s fears. It is a child’s lesson in the language of the physical, that teaches us we are individual, but not alone.
