Touch

When I touch a horse, or am within a few feet of it, I experience the world differently.  It is not something that I know how to measure.   It is there however.  What to call it?  A magnetic field, a gravitational field, the presence of another living being, shared breath? It is perhaps all of these things.   When I walk into a herd of cows the manner in which I approach, the thoughts that I am thinking, my gestures, where I look, and what I intend all matter to the cows.  It’s not that they can read my mind, it’s that they can read bodies.

Warm skin of a dog, a horse, a cow – the brain buzzes with the contact, hand to fur. 

At an agricultural fair, which is the only place that most city-folk get to touch a large animal, you see this all the time, how touching an animal strips away all of the masks for a moment.  For a moment, the moment of contact, there is wonder, stillness, the experience of warmth: you see it on the faces of old people and young, tattoo-ed city toughs, women in heels and elaborate make-up, mothers, fathers.

That is a language, just that moment of stillness, the contact, the way an animal makes you feel for a moment, that relief, that sense of flowing out beyond the ego-mind, that enlarged sense of being that is there for a moment.

What is the value of that moment when two bodies communicate?  What is value of basic sanity, and the small things that allow it to be?