To Count by Touching

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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We need to count by touching not by adding and subtracting. – Mark Nepo

Counting by Touching

We begin when we count by touching.

Our capacity to begin is a gift. Fresh starts. Do overs. Clean slates. We can begin again and again and again. The only limit to our beginnings is our mind’s capacity to imagine. To touch is to begin because touching is a reaching out, a risking, an opening, a creating. Touching is beginning as we allow our pain to be relieved, our thoughts to be freed, and our fear to be soothed.

We see when we count by touching.

Seeing and being seen happens when we count by touching. Seeing, in a counting by touching sense, means deep connection. Seeing allows numbers to become real, words to live, and awe to happen. Addition and subtraction can happen without seeing: touching makes seeing possible.

We cherish when we count by touching.

I cherish and appreciate being cherished. People with the capacity to cherish, to care in a way beyond normal boundaries of kindness, are treasures. Cherishing looks like counting by touching when we hold, protect, enfold, honor, lift up. Being someone who cherishes and surrounding myself with those whose cherish gets more and more important as the years go by.

We live when we count by touching.

Counting by touching is like breath. It is vital. It connects. It gives space . It builds up. Counting by touching is living stripped down to bare bones. It is risking failure and change. It is hopeful, optimistic, audacious, honest, and fierce.

We heal when we count by touching.

Perhaps the hardest, and most important, thing we are asked to do in our lives is to heal. Healing requires making peace. Healing requires holding the parts of ourselves we may not love long enough for the tears to flow and softness to return. That is counting by touching.

https://kitt.global/june-12-to-count-by-touching-mark-nepo-the-book-of-awakening/