The Work of Winter: Touch and the Remembering of the Body

Touch. The first sense. The first language. Before sound, before sight, before any word was formed, there was the meeting of skin with world, a quiet dialogue between body and existence. Through touch we learned that we are here, that there is ground beneath us, that life can be met and known. It is the oldest way of saying yes.

Many speak of five senses, yet if we listen more closely, there are many, many more, each opening a doorway between head, heart, and hands. At the foundation of them all lies touch, the first to awaken and perhaps the most essential. Before the eyes have opened or the ear has turned to sound, we feel. Touch is the moment when self meets world, a conversation of presence and belonging. Through it we come to know, I am here.

Touch is not merely the brushing of surfaces. It is how we listen with our skin. Every gesture speaks: a hand extended, a palm withdrawn, the press of soil, the warmth of another. When touch is gentle, the body learns trust. When it is absent or harsh, our orientation in the world trembles. Touch shapes how we relate, how we receive, how we allow ourselves to be met.

In the long history of thought, sight has often been placed above all other senses, the sense of distance, control, illusion, and abstraction. From this grew a belief that knowledge depends on separation, that understanding lies in looking upon rather than dwelling within. Yet beneath the eye’s dominion lies an older intelligence. Touch roots us in immediacy. It gives us proprioception, the knowing of where we stand, and kinesthesia, the felt movement of life through us. It awakens the inward sensing of heartbeat, breath, digestion, and emotion. Through touch, the body becomes the first map of the soul. The skin remembers what the mind forgets: the warmth of belonging, the weight of being held, the texture of safety.

Over centuries, the lessons of the senses have been overshadowed by the dominance of language and, more recently, by the rule of information. The fragile empirical world, once resistant to our attempts to contain and catalogue it, is disappearing beneath relentless accumulation and abstraction. Data has replaced sensory pleasure. We have become more interested in the description on the bottle’s label than the taste of the wine itself. What are we, and what do we truly know, when we have forgotten that our senses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could?

This forgetting has consequences. The more we move through screens and abstractions, the more we lose our orientation in the physical world. Our fingertips meet glass screens and plastic remote controls more often than bark or skin. Our communication grows wordy but bloodless. The body becomes a background instrument rather than the ground of our being. What was once lived as touch has become commentary. The pulse of life is replaced by its summary.

To remember, to return to sensation and to the unmediated meeting between self and world, is the work of winter.

When the world quiets and the clamour of growth withdraws into root and stone, we too are invited to descend and inhabit our own bodies more completely. Winter draws us down from the intellect’s distance into the earth’s nearness. It asks us to stop reaching outward and to feel the weight of our own being, like a seed pressing into soil. The element of earth governs this season, the slow, steady rhythm of form, substance, and embodiment. Earth is the element of gravity, of knowing where and who we are. Through earth, we return to touch.

Yet winter is not only a season of the world. It is also a state of being. Each of us carries an inner winter, the place we turn to in times of challenge, upheaval, or change. When life asks us to slow down, to listen more deeply, or to meet uncertainty, we instinctively move inward. We grow quiet on the outside so that something inside can speak. This, too, is the work of touch — to come back to our physical selves when life feels stripped bare, to find steadiness not in answers but in contact. Inner winter is the soul’s way of rooting down, of finding ground again when everything above seems in flux.

Touch and earth speak the same language, one of contact, patience, and presence. To touch is to earth. To press a palm against the flank of the hill, to feel frost biting through glove or skin, to kneel and smell the loam: these are acts of remembering our physical being. They remind us that we are not separate from matter but made of it. Flesh is not the opposite of spirit; it is the place where spirit takes form.

Winter brings this truth closer. In the thin air of dark months, the senses sharpen. Cold stings the face, the hearth’s warmth sinks deep, the texture of wool becomes a small salvation. The body begins to know itself again through contrast: cold and heat, rough and soft, stillness and movement. This is not ascetic withdrawal but the restoration of sensory integrity. It is the season of re-embodiment, when the soul returns to its dwelling.

In our digital age we live much at arm’s length, seeing, scrolling, rarely feeling. The result is a subtle unmooring, a drift away from the warmth and depth of being human. The antidote is not more information but more contact. Real contact. With earth, with each other, with our own inner life.

Touch is how we listen with our skin.

To touch is to acknowledge life’s presence, not only in others but within ourselves. It is the counterweight to abstraction, the medicine for disembodiment. When we tend to touch, whether through the clay we shape, the soil we turn, or the body we inhabit, we begin to restore relationship with the earth element and with the living ground of our own being. To touch the world gently is to affirm that we still belong to it.

Winter teaches this lesson quietly. Beneath its stillness, everything leans toward contact: root to rock, seed to soil, creature to burrow. It is not a season of death but of intimacy. A time to draw near. To remember that to be human is to be touched, and to touch in return.

Place a hand now upon your chest. Feel where you begin and where the world begins again. This is the threshold of all knowing. The skin, the soil, the winter ground each murmurs the same truth: you are here.

© 2025 Niamh Criostail and Heartlands Publishing. All rights reserved.