Touch

When a poet writes – creates – she's at her very best – settled, connected and inspired enough to write about more than what is immediately apparent. She enters the imagination. This is not a self-made world of imaginings and idle make-believe (although I love that term) but the world of energy. Feelings, nuances, subtleties, glimmers, intuitings – all the product of the interaction between her energy and other energies – when another energy inhabits her space as her energy inhabits its. This is the realm of touch – what my teacher calls the miracle of touch – skin on skin – energy on energy – the great sustainer and nourisher. It is perhaps the most important thing in life – affection – something in you seeping and melting in equal measure so that boundaries really do disappear and those blending fringes – where one becomes the other – the place of magic and transformation – bleed into your entirety. This is what I feel when I work with my teacher. There is no part of him that isn't me, but equally there is no part of him that isn't touched – affected and infected – by any other impinging on his energy for whatever reason. This makes for an immense richness, especially since he actively keeps alive all memories – his past is as present to him as what happens now – as, in a very real way, is his future. It is the only way to effectively yield – to be total in your awareness and be in the event before it happens, or to have the event in you. We are all meeting places of so much and the aim of Heartwork is to awaken that muchness so that our essential nature, which tinges and rings through all of it, knows its vital place in the world and gradually develops the strength and confidence to enter more thoroughly that world through the skin and hearts of other energy beings. Everything is an energy being, including the air you breathe and the water you drink, and the thing in you that actively improves the energy of that being we call respect. Without it there is no yielding, no communication, only force and oppression.