In The Absence Of Touch, We Can Still Feel

Stillness is how we feel what cannot be touched.

There’s little space for unloving words these days. Hearts are shattering while others soar off to new places. But hearts are also swelling with perspectives being dusted off, pulled off the shelves with swift movement to reveal and share inner wisdom with one another.

Humanity leans in and prayer becomes universal in too many ways to manuscript it all. It can only be felt. A vibration. A knowing. A steady echo that becomes louder the more we twist open the jar. The more it fizzles to the surface.

A clarity clashing with reality, and yet we ask ourselves, What is real anymore? We scrape up the remains of lust and toss it for pure heart. Love. Whatever it is that love means now.

We bridge gaps between fantasy and numbness, worlds where we can just live in our technology and not have to look up. But now we’ve been jolted out of our matrixes as we’re forced into real bubbles, cutting us off from what we were willingly choosing to before. When it’s no longer chosen and becomes mandated, it’s hard to distract ourselves from what our bodies and our minds are feeling withdrawal from—each other.

That world is shattering and it’s our moment to look up, to reach out and to feel what we haven’t tried to in too many years. It’s our time to release what our souls have yearned for but were apart from for too long, as the irony of it all takes us deeper within.

We aren’t martyrs; we aren’t warriors. We are just experiencers. We are gently breaking the vase of confinement while the walls around us protect us, helping us feel safe while the streets we always walked become farther from our feet, while the air feels like a Spring day hidden behind an invisible fog. We take a moment to breathe and suddenly we feel more cut off than safe.

We are just breathing in what we’ve been taught and told. We are just doing what we’ve always done, what we now know cannot continue to be. We are breathing differently now.

We are becoming what we want to be. Who we need to become. How we want to live. Where we need to go. Why we have to go. We are letting it lead us.

And here I am, telling you what I can only hear from the depths beneath my armor, my walls tumbling down without choice. Because we all have to connect our bridges. We need to walk across them, hold out our hands, and reach. When the world is telling us holding hands is something we may not do with a stranger for a very long time, we have to keep reaching.

I ask you to know there’s other ways. Love will live. We will keep feeling. We will start knowing. More and more, we will make more with our strength and not with our fear. We will access what we never knew was inside us all along. And when we step back out into the world, though it won’t be the way it once was, we will look up. We will smile at each other, and we will at last hold each other again without fear but with more embrace than there was before.

The late and noble George Harrison reassures me that “all things must pass” now. And I am falling in love with what I cannot touch. What I can only feel. The stillness in song and candlelight and the heartbeat of it all. 

Can you feel it right now, as this prose ends with the notion of the impending silence and the stillness seeping into your consciousness? Breathe it in; let it become you. I bet you will know it. I know you will feel it.

Tell me, what does it feel like?