The photograph at left is of an electric meter box. A few light touches during editing transformed it into a pattern of purple textures that resemble evening clouds. 

   To the world, texture is a physical word. To the loving, texture helps describe the feel of sacred encounters. 

   My relationship with my children has textures. It began when I held them as babies – their skin, the scent of their foreheads, the sound of their first cries. All of these textures mattered because they were informed by Love.  

   The four decades since then have created memories that play today amid our reunion embraces and the chances I have, now, to encounter my children's children. 

   My relationship with my work has another range of textures. In courtrooms, I recall things like the touch of the counsel table as I waited to deliver a closing argument to a jury. More deeply, I remember the feel of my daily and nightly encounters with work that I loved.

   I remember my handshakes with patients and the way they looked up at me from their sick beds wishing, perhaps, that I was their doctor or nurse instead of the administrator. The only healing I could give them was reassurance.

   It is the resonance of those reassurances with both them and with my fellow employees that made the texture of those times worthwhile. If I had hated those days, the textures would feel cold as chains. Since I loved those days, they lift my life. 

   When Love is present, touch is different. Sacred encounters have a texture that only the presence of Love can provide. 

   It's the difference between a superficial "hello" to a stranger and a sincere "how are you?" from a caregiver to a person in need.

   The proof of this comes by considering the difference between the touch you give to someone you love and the brush-by that happens when you bump someone on the street. The first encounter means everything. The second means nothing. 

   Metaphorical thinking allows us to dwell in the spirit of encounters. To think of Love as having textures, colors, tones, aromas, even tastes, enables each of us to embrace life as sacred rather ordinary, as filled with Love rather than informed by hate, as something whose textures our souls can feel.

   It's almost as if Love were made of silk we could drape around us. Something we could wear to celebrate life.

 -Erie Chapman

 Photograph: Gray Metal #2 – copyright erie chapman 2012