Rilke recently introduced me to the notion of poetry capturing experience. He taught me that a poem is not about emotions but about felt experience. I’ve been paying attention, and I agree that sharing experience makes a poem a poem. It is also what makes my life a life. Mine is not a real life, not a real experience unless it is a life felt as a whole body experience. And that experience has the feeling of velvet.
When I was a teenager, I sometimes wrote of my experience of entering the “velvet forest.” For me, walking in the woods was as tactile as brushing up against velvet. I remember the experience of my whole body. All the woody bark, the fluttering leaves, the lurking bushes, the hard ground were an experience of touching velvet. My eyes and my hands could experience the rough , hard and moist surfaces, and my experience was one of touching, stroking velvet. I was more alive when touching velvet.
It was an experience of my whole body. It was much more than the sensation of smell, touch and sight. The woods became real to me as enveloped and infused with velvet. I experienced the woods as velvet.
My days are now become my woods. My daily experience is increasingly one of feeling velvet. The flowers are made of velvet, my meditation cloak is one of velvet, my feet walk on velvet ground. I move through velvet as I go from room to room. My senses are slowly becoming tuned to the velvety nature of things as I experience the world as it really is.
The granite of my kitchen counter is more than cold and hard. It has the soft and ancient touch of velvet. I look out into the backyard, and I feel the soft velvet of snow, trees and bushes. I feel the velvet not with my eyes, but with my whole body.
Slowly, I am realizing the velvety nature of things and they are so lovely to touch. All things, even people, are made of velvet, and I gently touch that soft presence whenever I allow myself to experience it.
I use to walk alone into my velvet forest as a teenager. I have learned that I can walk in a velvet world as an adult. The touch is so soft, pleasant and peaceful. I am at home in velvet.