Heroes Not Zombies

This little plant stopped me in my tracks. I’m sure it was the glistening of the sunlight on the millions of water droplets – my goodness, have you ever seen so many on a single leaf?

I think it’s particularly good at catching the water because its leaves feel like velvet…..at least when they are dry!

This is a plant I always want to touch. It’s soft and delightful. I wrote yesterday about gentleness and this is a plant which encourages you to be gentle, I find. It seems to want to be stroked, to have you lightly run your fingers over it.

As I thought about this I was struck by our two uses of the word feeling – one for the physical sensation of touch, and other for that subjective experience of emotional tone, which nobody can see but which creates the foundations for all of our daily experiences.

Funny we should use the same word, but then we do that a lot with language don’t we? For example, I use the word “touch” to describe the action of running my fingers over this leaf, but we also talk about “getting in touch”, or “keeping in touch”, when we mean communicating with each other, even when, or especially when, we are in very different, physical locations.

As Lakoff and Johnson describe in their “Metaphors we Live by”, almost all of our metaphors are embodied, and much of our language uses metaphors – after all it’s hard to speak of subjective experience objectively isn’t it?