The other week, I commented that there were two "categories" of words on my old handwritten Goddess list that I hadn't yet tackled here in my blog. Number one is words associated with royalty and aristocracy; I broke the ice on that last time by talking about "The Queen". Well, the other category that I seem to have deliberately skirted around is words that can relate to sexuality or sensuality. I often laugh -- the phrase, "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" may have been coined during my generation, but it never, ever resonated with me. Sex has played a really small role in my life, drugs have played no role in my life, and while I remember just about every rock song ever having played on the radio (I have that kind of retentive brain!), I only ever attended one outdoor rock concert (The Band), listening from several blocks away. My passion, drug, and music were records of Howells, Byrd, Tallis, and so forth. (Grammar?! Struggling with that today!)
So I guess the best word for easing into this arena seems to be "touch". Even plain old touch hasn't factored much into my life, although in the end, it's not a plain old word. Its noun and verb forms take up 3/4 of a page in my old Concise Oxford Dictionary!
Yikes. There is a reason I have tried to ignore some of these words. I'm already nearly in tears. I'll do my best.
"Touch" can actually be a fairly innocuous concept, really. When two things make direct physical contact, they touch. My book is "touching" the edge of the bookshelf. Modern racing sailboats barely "touch" the water. That kind of thing.
Where the concept seems to get nuanced is when humans do the touching. May I first say this: at least in my concept of the Goddess, all Her touch is loving, appropriate, kind, and compassionate. Without exception. In a sense, adding a word like "touch" to my list twenty years ago may have been me trying to convince myself that human touch can be kind, can be thoughtful and appropriate. I have no memory of having been abused in this lifetime, so my cringing somewhat at the thought of touch may be from not having been touched very often as a child, or past lifetime memories, or an empathetic reaction to the violence all around us, or perhaps just having had a particularly solitary journey.
And of course, the religious and spiritual constructs we are all heir to have focused on divinity "out there", not within us or touching us -- God up in the heavens, at a distance, transcendent. Heck, even in Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam", God's and Adam's fingers don't actually touch! Such an image makes no sense whatsoever from a Goddess perspective -- humans are enclosed, touched, protected by a mother's body for nine full months before birth. Actually, touch is what starts the creation of humans, and nourishes us, even after birth and throughout our lifetimes, even though our culture seems to try to paint a different picture, to keep us mostly apart.
Hmm...this is so emotional that I think I will need a second go at it before long. How undernourished one is when there is too little loving touch. I'm talking about a toddler running to mom and holding onto her legs, or dad holding a child on his shoulders, or a cat on a lap, or just experiencing a spontaneous pat on the shoulder to say, "you're appreciated", or "you've done good!" or "Wow, I'm glad you are here!" The active divinity in lovingly touching the soil and planting a flower, or taking healthy ingredients, mixing them with a spoon, and making a delicious meal. The divinity of enjoying the feel of wool, or velvet, or moss. The divinity of simple touch. For the moment, that's about as far as I can go in breaking into this aspect of the love of the Goddess...
