The Power of Touch
Never has a hug been so precious to me … and never have my senses been so heightened by the simple things in nature – sunshine, wind, rain, moonlight. And yet, one of the most startling things about this pandemic is the way in which a weird kind of war has been declared on human touch.
There have been great historical plagues before. And many of them far more gruesome. But I think it’s fair to say that none of them have exploded with quite the same suddenness – or on quite the same scale – that nearly eight billion of us are now experiencing the highly contagious, raging global wildfire that is Covid-19.
Touch is literally being rationed in a way it’s never been before – even in wartime. At least we could still hug each other then. But now, incredibly, people are dying alone, lest they infect their families, friends, lovers, partners, husbands. For the very first time in our collective history, we are being deliberately held away from each other in order to save not only our own lives but the lives of the people we love.
In many places it’s even become the law. Getting too close to each other in public or gathering with more than just one other person can result in thousands of dollars worth of fines.
Make no mistake, social distancing is essential – but it’s also maddeningly confusing and counter-intuitive. Human hands and arms and lips are not just a source of pleasure – they have a real capacity to heal and alter lives. Consider the electricity of first love; the reassuring pat of a friend’s hand; the fierce bear hug of reunion; the sweet soft cheek of a smiling child or an elderly grandmother’s pressed close to our own; the healing care of a therapist or nurse. Back in the 1980s it was discovered that Rumanian babies left neglected in orphanages failed to thrive physically or develop neurologically as a result of the lack of human touch in their lives. We learned for certain that touch is inseparable from who we are as human beings. Yet here we are deprived outside our households – and sometimes within too – of the very thing that not only helps make us human but which has the capacity to alleviate suffering, bring about medical miracles and energise us with a connection that could potentially save lives. And this could go on for quite some time … months at least in our best case scenarios.
Sensuality of all kinds is effectively my work – I write and sing about love. I sculpt with my hands in clay and wax. I perform my way through videos. Music lights my ears. I know that we can still smell and taste and hear and see … but I believe we need to develop another sense to make up for the human to human component of the one we’ve temporarily lost – a spiritual kind of sensuality that will remind us of all the things we feel in that magical, often delightfully unexpected moment of physical contact, however fleeting, with another person. We need a new kind of touch – one with just as much power to reach each other as the 3D sensibility we’ve become so accustomed to.
So how do we achieve this?
We need to love more with our smiles and our voices, make a conscious effort to engage each other’s eyes – even when we’re out walking or shopping. We need to infuse our cooking with aromatic intent, read each face we meet with genuine care and concern, move respectfully around each other in public spaces as if in a playful dance with circumstance rather than the soulless human chess game of avoidance, rejection and survival we can sometimes be inclined to play.
We need to reach for each other in our hearts and minds, love each other with all our collective light and hold hands psychically across the world as we wage battle with this terrible disease. And above all else, we need to laugh with each other, unite with each other in whatever way we can, using the great gift of technology to bring us all together. We need to find the good in ourselves and others and connect it up with as much energy as we can muster. We need to develop the superpower of collective touch. And maybe, just maybe, human touch will become something we don’t just experience and take for granted in the not too distant future of our joyful physical reunion in the three dimensional world but something we truly appreciate and really live in the realms of our hearts and minds.
Who knows? Maybe we really WILL start practising spooky action at a distance.
Erm … what’s that now you say?
Einstein famously found evidence for this idea in quantum mechanics, though it bothered him at the time because it contradicted known theories of physics. But basically it’s this … that an object can be altered, moved or otherwise affected without being physically touched by another object. That’s all of us right now, thrown into the washing machine of a massive quantum experiment in human entanglement and disentaglement that could heighten our emotional sensitivities, raise our psychic abilities and hone our intuition in ways we could never have predicted.
The sky for me is a great metaphor of the potential we have for this magnificent human oneness. We can see it in all its blueness, taste its snow and rain, hear the roar of its thunderous storms, smell the scent of bushfire smoke. We share it – it belongs to all of us – yet we cannot touch it. The sky truly has no borders – it is limitless – but infinitely fragile and beautiful just like us. We cannot fly through it to find each other just now but we can look up and know that everywhere on earth we see a piece of exactly the same connected perfection. We are one. And in this time of rationing of so many of the things we hold dear, we can lift our minds collectively to contemplate this great essential truth.
So spook away people – love each other as much as you possibly can – and let’s will ourselves to rise above this difficult time, maybe acquiring a few superpowers along the way while we do it.
** The Sky is My Country Too (feat. piano by J Edna Mae), is available for presale now – follow the link below to pre-save your April 27 stream, download, listen or share.
https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/susanmuranty/the-sky-is-my-country-too-feat-piano-by-j-edna-mae-2