So I walked in to the forest, by myself. I saw a tree fall. I was 85% certain that I heard it fall, even though I was the only one there and had yet to report it to anyone. 85%..thats pretty good for me.
Looking up at the canopy, above the fallen tree, light streams in touching theforest floor.
I am pretty certain that I see the light. I walk closer, somewhat cautiously, to touch it. (I am a big toucher...sometimes, I think, that if I can't touch it, it must not be real)
Words are playthings, variable subjective, with many different meanings depending on tone and inflection....basically, they are difficult to understand. So, I don't believe everything I hear.
Taste is...hmm, taste is difficult to describe because, mostly because of my food allergies. I have to be like a detective with my taste. If I can taste the substances that make my body very sick, then I can avoid the trip to the ER. So, I don't really trust my sense of taste because I have eaten things that I thought were safe, only to end up in the hospital. Hmmm, that would explain my love/ hate relationship with eating and food. Being afraid of getting poisoned kindof puts a damper on eating out and eating in general.
Sight..what I see...how can I rely on sight when I am unable to read emotions in peoples faces? I am very poor at remember faces and have embarrassed myself, more than once, by walking up to total strangers and engaging in conversation only to find out they are not the person that I thought they were.
[Embarrassment is where you try and duck for cover and hide deep within yourself and you cannot quite fit into that closet, for your foot is hanging out. And you keep slamming that door in the attempt to hide and you just continue to bruise your foot.]
Smell...is interesting for it is wideranging covering the most beautiful of odors ever created to bringing the most horrendous stench to your front door. Its the essence of something, but it is fleeting.
Touch...touch is real..its about being real. Because I can touch something, I am real. In touch, others become real. (I guess if you were aware of my extremely dissociative background this would make much more sense to the observer) I communicate, take in information, analyse, figure things out, interact with the world around me, by physical contact. I can bump shoulders or shake hands with someone and get a sense of whether this is someone who would be healthy to be around or someone to be avoided. I trust touch...I can feel such love and beauty with my hands, with my face. Did ya ever notice how rarely your face ever gets touched? How intimate such contact is? It is an extremely intimate gesture.
It is so very easy for me to identify the saddest time in my life. When I ran away from home, at 27, left my entire family and settled in Traverse City. There were months and months were I didn't know anyone or have anyone to touch. I remember how I longed for some type of human contact. It is the one thing that you cannot satisfy within yourself. It was a truly awful time for me.
On another negative note, the body memories of hot wheels tracks on the backs of my legs has been the most challenging memory to heal and erase. (I'll have to work on that one sometime because I was at the toy store, last week, buying presents for little guy and I saw those damn tracks and the sight of them made the backs of my legs hurt. Honestly, if you want to inflict great pain on someone, just grab one of those tracks and whip em. Funny, after a particularly bad whipping, those tracks started disappearing into the incinerator. And I had been hit with a wide variety of objects, but nothing has left such a lasting impression as those damn tracks.) So, even though touch has not always been pleasant, it is the sensation that I am most trusting of and comfortable with.
If I smell something...I experience it. If I taste it, hear it or see, its questionable. If I touch something...I know and believe it.
If I go up to that tree that fell..and I touch it...I know it has fallen. I believe that which I can feel.
