All day I have been waiting for the perfect time to write. The perfect time for my muse to visit me. The perfect time to write meaningful and interesting paragraphs. It was a hard day. I was upset about a construction project gone haywire in my kitchen. And, I had many small tasks to complete, as we all do. Each one led me to another task to consider. You know how it goes. So the whole day slipped away. The perfect time never arrived, so now, here I am with the deadline of the end of the day advancing, and darn it all, I am going to get in my 30 minutes a day.
I don’t feel inspired, I feel discouraged. But I am looking back at one of my writing journals from 2017, one of the things that popped up from under a pile of magazines I was purging (I know, but they were Poets & Writers magazines, and I hate to throw those away). This opinion piece was never edited, and I hadn’t read it again after writing it until now.
I am just going to put it out here, why not? Because writing is really “rewriting” and editing isn’t it? Here goes:
The Healing Power of Touch
February 24, 2017
The hands- how often we avoid them in our culture, and how much we miss them. Did you know you have to be licensed to lay hands on a person in some states, and maybe even your state? Ministers are usually given a pass. They are allowed to lay their hands on you, in the healing way, but they are sometimes meaning to recruit you to their particular God club, when I believe the hands have the power to transmit energy anyway, Atheist or Angel.
Of course, we are carbon based, but so is a lump of coal. We are matter, but so is a skyscraper. What is really special, and we all know it but choose to occupy 99% of our thoughts with other quasi-awarenesses (possibly even alternative facts)- what is really special is that we all have the spirit within us. That is the unwritten dictionary definition of the word Alive, as it pertains to the animal kingdom- of which we humans are members of. Are you still unsure that a living person is spirit powered? Then you have not seen a dead body lately, or maybe never have you seen a person die right there in the room with you.
So- back to the hands. We are spirit, our hands are the transmitters. There is a fully researched seminal work on the power and effects of human touch. The name of the book is Touching, the Human Significance of the Skin, by Ashley Montagu (1986). We all learned about the young monkeys who were separated from their mothers and put into cages with everything they needed except for a mother’s touch. They died. Failure to thrive. It happens in the cribs of overcrowded orphanages around the world. It happens in nursing homes when people are separated from their families or pets.
The hands can heal, and they do. Nurses are being trained to administer healing touch. All that caring soaks right in. It is something machines can’t do, baby swings can’t do, massage chairs can’t do- only hands can do. Hands and spirit.