My connection to the physical world was different before I became a mother. I knew I would love my kids. What surprised me was how tangible a thing that love was. I was unprepared for the fact that holding them would be as necessary a thing as drinking water, that I could lose myself looking into their dark, deep, baby eyes, that I would be completely taken not only with their hearts and minds but also with their fingernails and armpits and cheeks and knees. I still experience moments of shock that I am connected to these beautiful, amazing, wholly-real-and-wholly-individual people.
* * *
But what I said about my connection to the physical world—maybe that’s not really true, after all. I remember being in a clothing store on an afternoon off from music camp when I was in high school, all alone and with lots of time on my hands. I walked from rack to rack, admiring all the artistic, too-sophisticated-for-me clothes. The lady behind the counter watched me for a while and then commented, “You like to touch everything and feel the different fabrics, don’t you?” She said it kindly, but I hadn’t realized until that moment that I was seeing as much with my hands as my eyes.
I remember that day in my second grade classroom, sitting on the floor. Maybe it was read-aloud time, maybe it was Show and Tell. I only remember watching another girl playing with dried glue and being struck with the thought that I wanted to do something with my hands. Badly. I wanted to feel something, or make something—just experience something with my fingers.
I remember realizing how enjoyable it was not only to make music with my violin, but also simply to feel the strings under my fingers, and to feel my bow moving against the strings.
I remember noticing that not only did I relish the soothing, repetitive motion of knitting, I relished stopping to run my hands over my work, to feel where I’d been.
My heart and mind—those were always givens. What I seem to forget at times is that I am body, also.
* * *
So I take it back. For all my head-in-the-clouds tendencies, I crave connection. I have always done a certain amount of my living inside my head, but maybe that makes touching the world more important. Yes, it’s still there. Yes, I’m still here.
* * *
Inner life, you can dip and soar, travel anywhere, live boldly, do things nobody would expect from a good, quiet girl. You expect to be free, unchained—wild, even—but something in you craves touch. You need to be able to land sometimes, to touch the earth. For all your otherworldliness, you carry deep within you the objects you ran your fingers over, the words people spoke to you, the things your eyes read in another’s, the food you savored, the scents you breathed in. Maybe this is how you know you didn’t make it all up. Your treasures—yes, they are stored up in your heart, but first they were in this world. Cut loose from them, you might just float away.
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