Reassurance

by Phil Porter

an excerpt from his book The Slightly Mad Rantings of a Body Intellectual Part One

…this goes better with a hug

I’m needy, needy, needy. Now that I’ve got that all out in the open, maybe I can accept that at a basic body level, at a basic skin-to-warm-skin level, I need to be calmed and collected.

And I’m not the only one.

Touch is the best way to get it, but we are in a touch-suspicious time. We are starved for touch, the kind that lets us know that we are here and we are OK, or just that someone else notices us.

Too bad we don’t have the cat’s practice of licking itself all over. I’ve heard that that is more of a reassuring action than it is for grooming. In all my cat-having years, I never figured out how he kept track of which spots he had done and which needed doing and how he could reach EVERYWHERE. My cat rarely had cowlicks (if that isn’t too interspecies an expression) until he got old and couldn’t quite bend in all the weird ways he could before.

Anyway, I’m getting off the subject.

It is going to be alright.
It is going to be alright
It is going to be alright.
(This goes better with a hug, but…)
It is going to be alright.