The sign at an entrance to my garden encourages visitors to touch in the garden. It is an invitation to sensuality. In the garden, plants reach out to brush against ankles, bushes lean over the path wanting to touch and be touched. There is the softness of cushions on chairs, the chill of water and ice in sweating glasses, the sound of water bouncing down rocks. The soft swish of luxurious, long green grass offers a sensuous experience of walking across the back yard. I feel its yielding softness under my feet.
Becoming sensual is an open threshold to awareness. This is a relatively new notion because, like most, I have been told to be cautious and wary of sensuality. Just like intimacy. The touch of skin is especially dangerous and to be avoided out of fear and protection, just like most forms of intimacy.
But I know that the touch of the angular, rough bark on my large tree can be highly sensual. To experience its firm, hard touch makes it easy to feel intimately connected to the tree, to simply be with it. Other opportunities to be sensual accompany me through the day. I only have to consciously open my senses to experience the world at every turn as I move from minute to minute.
There was a sensuality in the writing these words as I felt the pen move across the page of my notebook and heard its soft scratching noise. The sensation was accompanied with a deep feeling of stillness inside me. There is almost always a sensual aspect to the interior satisfaction I feel when I write, even when I am at the keyboard.
The cold surface of the sink, the warm rush of a shower, the soft encounter with a towel all contribute to a flowing stream of pleasant, sensual delights. I say leave me alone, all you fears and cautions about sensual delight and allow me the freedom to fully meet the world where it waits for me. I ignore caution and reach out, in the morning, for a day filled with sensual adventure.
The truly sensual is much more than what occurs in my finger tips, the recesses of my nose, or the taste buds on my tongue. For me, true sensuality is much deeper and experienced beyond the simple sensory. Sensuality is not in my skin, my eyes or my ears but occurs so deep inside me that it fills the whole expanse of my body.
To touch the hard, rough bark of the tree is not merely tactile but can be transformative to my roots. Perhaps it is in the awareness of the sensory that true sensuality exists for me. It is the sensory as known that stirs the deep sensual response inside of me. It is actually the deep awareness that allows the experience of deep sensuality.
This has happened for a long time when I walked through and touched the trees at my cabin, when I smelled the scent of the woods, when I allowed my skin to fully touch the water of the lake. These have all been the setting for a deeply sensual experience. My cabin is one of the most sensual places I know. The sensory experience has been only the threshold, the beginning of something much richer.
It has been the deeply felt awareness of the smell and touch of tree branches and the chill of the lake water where my sensuality has rested. The woods has been my teacher.