In a society where we are starved of touch,
the body learns to live like bark in winter —
upright, intact, ringed with silence,
holding its sap deep where no hand reaches.

Skin forgets its original language,
nerves speak only in echoes;
we move past one another like trunks
rooted in separate soils.

But touch is older than thought —
it is how moss knows stone,
how rain enters the grammar of earth,
how trees confer in the dark.

Touch is not indulgence —
it is instruction, it is instinct,
a forest teaching balance by letting
branches rest on branches,
and fallen logs nurse seedlings
steady until they can stand.

Without touch, the body becomes a closed canopy —
light blocked, chi trapped, growth distorted;
the heart colder, a contracted chest;
soil walked on too often,
hard-packed, unwilling to receive seed.

With touch, something ancient reactivates —
the nervous system exhales,
muscles remember mobility,
the spine remembers vertical grace,
as if a hand were the sun finding the clearing again.

A touch on the shoulder, a presence-filled exchange —
a path reappears,
an embrace that widens and expands,
the way a forest opens up after fire —
not ruined, but reset.

Touch precious it changes you,
like lichen slowly altering stone,
like palms warming cold fingers back into circulation,
like a body learning, finally,
that it does not have to harden to survive.

Touch is how we return to the forest within us:
the living, breathing, interconnected terrain
that was never meant to grow alone.