8 Traveling by Touch

If you didn't invite me I probably never would have gone for it, even though I really wanted to. I decided constant touch was the best way to guide if I couldn't be verbal. But, as we discussed, I had to balance between being oppressively in control and keeping the experience free-flowing. If anything, though, I wanted you to feel safe. This was excellent exercise for both my body and spirit at once. I was fully willing to trust you when I was blind, but I also found it interesting that I needed to deeply trust myself when you were blind. It was such an engaging chore to guide you. I easily lost track of time when I had to see for two. As soon as I was blind I felt we were constantly walking toward a cliff. But we went through a wormhole instead. I walked for some time, but I felt no real shift across space. Between putting the blindfold on in the greenhouse and taking it off at your door, everything happened on the other side of reality. I'm very glad to have been liberated from my assumptions and constructions of the world when you took up the chore of guiding. I was a kid again, waiting to see where we were going and how we would get there and what it would be like once we did. I want to keep seeing the world as I did when I couldn't see it. I will try to keep feeling it as I did when I led you.

Jeremy Horlacher, 30
Seattle, WA

Response...

You were like the ocean to me. Blue. Vast. Depth uncharted. There was a quiet mist around you. A haze that caused me to conclude that you feel and think vastly. Looking, liquid. Like the ocean, at every crevice of this life space continuum. I wondered if your silence was the choice of shyness, or the choice of keeping it in the realm of the sea. Regardless, I wanted to see, through your eyes. To see what it looked like to you.

Had you not revealed, that you wanted to go on this walk but couldn't ask, I wouldn't now have the courage to begin asking more people to go. Wondering who else might be really wanting, but shy. For me that's big, as I lived so much of my life feeling uncomfortable asking people to be with me in some way. You opened my eyes like that.

And thank you for taking me to the botanical gardens. For introducing me to another safe haven in the city. To sit, and touch, and commune with my plant friends, and rest my sometimes weary bones. Our walk was sweet to me. Like the kaleidoscope view of the sea, vast and blue, on a breezy summer day. Knowing, there is depth and strangeness lurking underneath the skin. Waiting for it to emerge.
Sacred.

Armen, 31
Seattle, WA