Oils, Healing, and Leaving Your Mark

On healing

“But I’m afraid it’ll break if I touch it.” said bird.

“I’m afraid,” replied bear, “it will break if you don’t.”

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📷: The Austin (33” tall by 22” wide)
…

Those things we hold most closely, change. Ever tighter, ever more quickly.

Oils from your hands, the touch of breath, the sway of emotion –
a personal patina, a constant transformation, of what was to what is, again + again.

A photograph. That last hug. The turn of a page.

Moments, mementos, memories, simply refusing to remain still.

I used to wear nitrile gloves when I made my wood and unpainted mobiles.

I didn’t want the oils from my hands to leave marks.

Mobiles dreamt up in my mind and made entirely by my hands, every part, every piece. Tactile in their very nature. And I didn’t want to leave a mark?

As if I had much say in the matter.

As if any of us does.

We leave marks everywhere we go, no matter if – or how hard – we try not to.

At the grocery store. In our text messages. Driving our cars. Even thinking our own thoughts inside our own heads – perhaps there most of all.

Marks upon marks upon marks – touching others, the world around us, ourselves.

Rippling and doubling, expanding and spreading out from us in ways we cannot even begin to compass.

We are born of such touches and some day we will die oiled by a lifetime of such marks.

Yesterday, I put my hand on his back. He was standing in the aisle at Fred Meyer. And I needed to get around him. He jolted as if I’d pierced his skin.

“I’m sorry,” he said, the rehearsed refrain of a culture that feels we’re always in the way, that keeps its distance.

“It’s all good,” I said. “It’s all good.”

And then he smiled. “It *is*,” he said. “It really is.”

A lifetime of changing and being changed by these simple acts of touch, marking one another in communion.

Who can you reach out and touch today?