To Live Without Skin

To live without skin. Because that is how it feels to receive. Softened. Disarmed. We can give love from a safe distance, but to receive… that is to allow ourselves to be infiltrated, occupied – by life, by another living thing, which we need as we need breath, but over which we have no control.

To step into relationship is to enter into a world of hurts: rejections, misunderstandings, disappointments. But it is where we are most human, where we fulfill that deepest longing to be here… now… in this… no matter how deeply we may also long to be elsewhere. Going deep inside, into the stillness, the darkness within – burrowing into our inner cave – is a homecoming to that which lives beyond this life, to the foundation and well-spring of our very being. But occupying that place solely cannot be our destination, for if it were, there would be no reason to have been given a body at all.

Our body demands to be in the world. It wants to stretch, taste, inhale, behold, consume, comingle. It wants to put its shoulder against life and see what springs back. It wants to cry out into the canyon and listen for the echo. It wants to know what happens when I am here. Whether that is an assault or humiliation, a caress or celebration.

Nothing that comes together, stays together. There is simply too much movement in the universe. But we can inhabit a world of withdrawal for lifetimes. We can make our separation real in our minds even if it denies the reality of our interdependence. We can convince ourselves we are unloveable and then behave in a way that makes us hard to love. We can tell ourselves others are selfish and shallow, and then notice only those qualities in them while pretending to transcend our own. We may feel elevated or protected, but inside we are withering. Not exactly because we are cut off from connection, but because we are cut off from truth. Because we are denying ourselves the opportunity to be alive in the world – not as a concept, but as a living, breathing, spontaneous, and self-regenerating thing continuously coming into being in relationship to everything else.

To feel that thing – the warmth of its breath, the beat of its heart, the scent of its fur – is to live without skin, to live without the protections that keep us numb to impact. It’s to say the thing we think cannot be said. It’s to go to the place we think we cannot enter. Its to reach out and touch the thing we’ve always believed we’ll defile. Not because we think we’ll receive what we seek, but simply to affirm that we aren’t built to live in our minds. We shelter in ideas when we’re scared, weaving fabrics that swaddle us in false safety. But what we really long for isn’t comfort, it’s truth. Its to know and experience what happens when I and you step over the perceived boundaries between us, so something genuinely new can emerge in the space we now share. And that requires both of us, at some level, to cease to be what we are, and to come into contact with what we’ve always been.

It would be comforting to turn this all into a map for living, but there is no such thing. There is only the still small voice – coaxing and nudging – and the louder voice – crowing and commanding – and us deciding each moment who to listen to. Sometimes doors are open. Sometimes they’re closed. Sometimes there’s warmth and fragrance within and sometimes there are pits of spikes. We venture out. We recoil. We gather experience and integrate it, and through it all we become both more substantial and of lesser consequence.

For the world can dismantle us and reconfigure us – out past the comforts of who we think people are and how things should work. And we can be dismembered and reconstituted within – beyond the confines of what we believe we need and are.

If you live as a raw, beating element of a breathing community – may you be conscious of the blessing of continuous alignment and renewal. If you ache to – may your longing soften you to receive and your courage propel you to say, go and do what lies out past what you believe is possible. If you fear or reject it – may your grief and exhaustion lead you deep within the earth where the soil can nourish you and the bedrock shield you, so you can feel what it is to live without skin held by the benevolent and unconditional Others.

Where ever you go, receive. Receive the imperfect love of your fellow humans – their awkward words and well-intention gestures that remind you that you are real in someone else’s story. Receive the weight and presence of your body – all the sights, sounds, and sensations that comfort and delight. Receive the climate of your heart – the ever-shifting storms of ache and agitation, the resentment, resignation, and elation that are the compass and barometer of your journey. Receive the subtle and constant company of the divine – the uncanny encounter, the ironic lesson, the unexpected grace, the intuitive insight.

Whether or not you know it or want it, having a body means you are part of this world. Being aware means you are the world experiencing itself. And as long as you have those two things, you are exactly what and where you are meant to be.

Nancy