Register touch anew—this ability to intake information through skin, legs, toes, and, mostly, fingertips. And lips are the threshold to touch and taste like ears are to sound and feel.

As humans, we take in so much through sight that the other senses, like touch, weaken. Touch is vital. I strum walls. Brick walls scratch the flesh and curve around us everywhere, showing us where to go and what to avoid.

And then there is the heat of sun-warmed fuzzy tummies. There are so many things to touch and ways to be touched.

“I never had a sense that the ability to win came from me,” wrote artist Patti Smith. “I always felt it was in the object itself. Some piece of magic that was animated through my touch.” Smith imagined igniting latent power in her beloved marble collections only when she touched them.

At night, I’d pour my booty upon my bed and wipe them with a chamois. I’d arrange them by color, by order of merit, and they’d rearrange themselves—small glowing planets each with its own history, its own will of gold.
From Patti Smith’s Woolgathering

We touch, without thinking, the things most precious to us. We stroke them to release memory, bring coolness or warmth, and engage. To love.

The first time I held my daughter, my hands were woefully inadequate. I felt a compulsion to lick her. (Although kissing sufficed.) To touch her with some warm, wet, stimulating brilliance, the kind she had been used to before she came into the cold air. To enclose her again.

I’ll never forget reading Walt Whitman’s lines of rapture, held captive by joy:   Whitman, Walt. Song of Myself. (London, UK: Vintage Classics, 2014)  
Whitman revised “Song of Myself” throughout his life until he died in 1892. The edition I used is a Vintage Classics reprint of the original 1855 text. Many versions are available, however. The Poetry Foundation’s published version from 1892, here, is the last published version which, among other things, begins “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” (Italics are mine).  
And why shouldn’t a poet write and rewrite? The publication of something is such an imposed finality to something that is a living, breathing, changing thing. A poem. I edit and re-edit my posts all the time. They change as I change.

I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer
morning;
You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged
your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you
held my feet.
From Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

This is touch. This is to be touched. Both physically and in some higher implication of what it means to be touched. Affected. To be wrapped in the presence of another being.

“We are made for unending meeting and exchange,” wrote American poet David Whyte. Whyte believed that being touched – and touchable – is something we desire and long for, not necessarily as a sense or perception but as a feeling, an emotive act of understanding and being understood.

To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world; of weakness, a sign of fear rather than strength, and betrays a strange misunderstanding of an abiding, foundational, and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.
From David Whyte’s Consolations

Touch isn’t necessarily being around people, even when alone, we commune through touch. It’s more than sensory; it is exchange.

Consider Japanese novelist Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, who navigated us through the materiality of Japanese construction—ceramics, walls, doors, wood—embracing the texture of paper that gives us “a certain feeling of warmth, of calm and repose.” Tanizaki’s 1934 essay on Japanese aesthetics invited us to engage with materials, spaces, and objects in a way hitherto ignored.

Touch is a way to perceive the world. But it’s more than registering data. Touch is a highly intimate and lasting form of interaction or engagement.

The first time I held my daughter. Senses are scrambling to make sense of the unfamiliar and crying, a large sound. Seeing is nothing—a newborn body isn’t like anything I’d ever seen or ever will again. Touch. It’s all there is. Holding her… It was the first time I touched her. She had, however, been feeling me for nine months. She cuddled up and showed me how.

“The minute that comes to me over the past decillions / There is no better than it and now,” wrote Whitman.

That moment of first touch was such a profound engagement that it carved out a space, a memory I can reenter for the rest of my life. Something that affixes me to her.

David Whyte assures us that touch, though it makes us vulnerable, affects us positively.

Patti Smith wrote Woolgathering for her 45th birthday from the depths of what she called melancholy and from the corner of her garden near a willow that touched her shoulders.

Her reflections, including touching mementos in her home to a moment where she cuts her hair, are full of touch. A way for her to break through an untouchable identity. To touch and be touched. It is how we expand our vitality into the world and receive its vitality. A power, a vulnerability. As we carry it ourselves, we must respect it in others.

Whitman’s majestic poem was a song of light and human connectedness. Our intense need to engage. To be affected.

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

All the things in nature that long to be touched are gently noticed. Humans long to be loved and to be shown kindness.

American poet Mary Oliver (who called Whitman “the brother she never had”) wrote about stones being touched by rain.

After rain after many days without rain,
it stays cool, private, and cleansed, under the trees,
and the dampness there,
married now to gravity,
falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground

[…]

and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,
will feel themselves being touched.

Are you waiting for the rain?