TO TOUCH A STONE

“this hand is one with all that was…”

Someone sent me a poem from, of all unlikely places for a poem, “Arizona Highways” magazine. It is by Roland English Hartley. and called “To Touch a Stone.” It reminds us everything we touch is continuous with everything else - this keyboard I’m writing on with the stars! That we should feel disconnected from anything - from nature, from other people, from aspects of ourselves - is an evolved illusion. Yet it gives us a kind of weird existential leverage to see ourselves as having space, having separation between us and other things - a space we can cross to create, to manipulate, to relate. We can’t get leverage if there’s no distance between us and the things we want to effect.

Yet as this poem points out, and as, in some sense, all poetry and spirituality point out, we can always experience a unity underlying this controversial separateness. So let’s touch stones, each other, the hidden places within, with musical instruments, bodywork clients, our lovers’ bodies to reconnect, to know that even in science, not only religion, all is one. Each time we bring our hands together in a prayer, we embody that knowledge - all is one, no matter what we think!

To Touch a Stone - by Roland English Hartley

 (from Arizona Highways)

To touch a stone, to touch it with the fullness of sense,

With the knowing mind alive in the fingertips

Is to go deep back where all belongings were,

To feel the flames and the floods that wrought the earth,

And know this hand is one with all that was.

Touching a stone declares oneself a part

Of all the vast upsurgings of the world,

The long advance from formlessness to form,

And nature's mute resolve to be aware.

The essence of this stone is life's first home;

Here we are housed a while with bird and tree.

Alone? There is no one of us alone

In a world where a living hand may touch a stone.