for the space between worlds

a blessing for skin

We have expectations, don’t we? For the ways things go, for the way we hope they go. I had expectations for sand, sea, and sunshine. For sun drenched days that shook out my slumbering, winter body. When you step outside in Mexico the air hits like wall of lush green song. Have you ever stood next to a speaker at a concert and felt the beat reverberate through your whole body?

The air there is like that. It enters every cell. It softens the limbs and the lungs. It resonates with mystery song.

And yet my skin had other plans for how to mingle with the tropics, hers is a fair and freckled way of being. And so after a visit to the ER upon returning to Canada, she asked me to set aside my expectations, discomfort and disappointment in service of a different set of eyes. To find wisdom in the symptoms, to hear the hurt as a reflection of too much fire and too much effort in unsustainable directions. Yang, when what was truly asked for was Yin. And to slow long enough to hear her less as inconvenience and more as language.

My skin showed me a place I thought I had excavated. I was comfortable naming my interalized productivity. I knew rest, I knew softening. I thought that efforting against the machine was a thing I left behind. Yet in the surprising emergence of my skin’s refusal to succumb to what I asked of her, I found another doorway. I opened it, unceremoniously, with a prescription for steroid cream, and let her show me a stone unturned.

“I can’t imagine it.”
The stars say
“Tell us again about goosebumps.
Tell us again about pain.”

- Andrea Gibson (from “For the Days I Stop Wanting a Body”)

In all the discourse around embodiment, I see little attention paid to skin. We say Body, we talk about developing interoception, we wonder about the phenomenology of a moment (what is this like to experience?) from the inside. Yet what about the layer that holds the inside together? That soft, liminal place between your inner world and the outer world? What is the lexicon of that place? And can we attend to it in a different way, a way that isn’t shaped by how it performs. Can we listen below its imperfection, its inconsistency, its aging and changing? And if we were to suspend what we hoped it would do for what it is actually saying, might something unexpected make its way into consciousness?

A Blessing for Skin

This is the barrier, place between worlds

tender film manifesting form in the womb

that which is made of the same cells as eye

as brain

as bones of the face

the largest organ that brushes against the living world.

Feeling, sensing, seeing

its literacy arising before our meaning making

its knowing stripped by systems that reject what is imperfect and holy and rebellious

skin holds for us a story of time, of wisdom, of impermanence

of a different type of power.

May you wake up to the ways you have turned away from your skin

may this world of ancient information unfurl under your noticing

may you remember that the subtle layers of your body tell the truth you are not ready to act on, so that when the moment comes you can say

this is something I always knew

may you honour the knowing of this organ, this galaxy of cells, so that each imperfection invites you deeper into relationship with the cathedral it protects.

May you become quiet enough to hear the song of your skin

through its chorus of tingle, flush, itch, and tremble

its wrinkle and its doorway.

May you rejoice in its refusal to participate in anything other than what is

wonderfully and painfully human.

Photo by armina arhm on Unsplash