Touch is important to me.  I think it always was, but for most of my life I was really very restrictive about people touching me casually.  My feelings on the matter of touch at that time were, more or less, ‘if we aren’t going to have sex, please don’t touch me’.  How very isolating that was!  I’m in a different place as a person – although, admittedly, I don’t prefer total strangers ‘breaking the contact barrier’ with me, without warning or consent.  I really enjoy being touched, though.  So much baggage, so little time… lol.

I was thinking about touch, and my issues relevant to physical intimacy in general, and it reminded me that I had been considering this very topic just last night in a moment of nostalgia.  I was contemplating a tender point in life’s journey, and learning to Love, when I had finally really begun to welcome touch into my every day experience.  My lover at that time, an amazingly nurturing man of considerable skill with relationship building, had a practice of welcoming me home from work – or the store, or wherever else I had happened to be – with a moment of real connection.  He would put everything down for an embrace, and a moment of connected contact.  There we would be, in each other’s arms, holding each other, feeling the warm of our bodies close together, feeling our heartbeats begin to beat together, and experiencing all the wonders and intangibles of being in the arms of someone we love… and it was every day, every time we reconnected after being apart, and it was… extraordinary.  I began to do it, too… every time he was away from me, and returned, I put everything down and put my attention on him, on us, on now.  It was my first experience of loving mindfully – but I didn’t know it at the time. It’s an amazing thing to experience.

I miss it.

Oh, there’s no lack of affection in my life. I have wonderful loving partners and a good life.  We share mutual affection, and closeness, and as much intimacy as we can make time for… real life sometimes seems to get in the way.  Now I often find myself crying out in the wilderness of my chaos and damage for this something that seems missing… those seemingly infinite moments of connection and intimacy are far more rare now, and kind of hit or miss.  I feel it.  I’m learning enough about love, and loving well, to recognize what I miss. (Hey! That’s real progress for me!)  I guess now I need to learn the words to say ‘I love this. I want this.’ and then go about the business of ‘being the change’… that’s the harder part; making it a verb, an action, a reality.  Being the change.  How do I build something I don’t understand? Life’s curriculum apparently gets more challenging as I progress through the lesson plan.  🙂

I do want to say something more… if you have this level of intimacy and connection with your friends and lovers and partners – any or all of them – cherish it! Nurture it! Value it above all things, because taking it for granted can result in a loss that feels…well, it’s very similar for me to grieving the loss of someone dear to me, actually.  The sense of ‘being without it’ is hard to overstate.

Today, I will learn something more about being intimate, and fostering intimacy in my relationships.