the Earth is my lover

and i'm ready to be touched again

It’s 11:11 on a sun-drenched morning over Koninchi Bay, Bowen Island. I’m sitting barefoot in the courtyard, laptop resting on a table carved from driftwood, a Siamese cat dozing at my feet.

Today. Is. Glorious.

I can see the timid heads of spring’s first buds peeking through the leaves and roots in the lovingly tended garden beds. I note honeysuckle. Olive. A stoic, deer-chewed rose bush. Wild mint and rosemary. I know these coming weeks will bring an explosion of colour as flowers unfurl to flirt with the sun.

I don’t know the names of the birds I can hear, but their chittering floats in the salty air with the tinkling of wind chimes and the hum of bees. A soft, spiralling melody I want to sip and swirl around my mouth like honeyed syrup. Lazy. Hypnotic. Delicious.

There’s a chill to the wind when it swings around. The brief gusts send shivers down my shoulder blades. If I close my eyes, it almost feels like a lover’s breath, tracing the back of my neck. Makes me arch back into it.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just drunk on sunshine after these months of winter.

Spring is here, and I am alive.

When I moved to Canada, I was warned about seasonal depression. The cold. The darkness. The loneliness. The lack of vitamin D.

So, in good Virgo fashion, I wrote a List of essentials to prep.

Thick woolly socks. Warm lights. WhatsApp voice notes and a time zone converter. D3+K2 drops under the tongue every morning¹.

And as you can see, I survived said winter. The List was a success.

But coming out the other side, I feel like I was blindsided by something major nobody mentioned:

How wrong and lonely it felt to be cut off from the Earth itself for months on end.

𖤓

I’ve spent most of my life living by the ocean in Australia, in climates and places that lend themselves to being outdoors often, lightly clothed.

Unless it’s a) the middle of winter, b) there are bindis², or c) it’s high summer and you don’t want to blister the pads of your feet on sand or bitumen, leaving the house without shoes is not uncommon.

Nobody bats an eyelid on the coast if you wander into a convenience store barefoot, in a bikini top, trailing sand behind you.

You can still walk down the beach and go for skinny dips in the winter without getting frostbite. And, if you’re a me, there are still trees to climb and rocks to lizard on and grassy knolls to lie across all through the year.

My point is: my body is used to being touched by the Earth and the sun basically every day—some days for hours at a time.

(Consent is implied. Enthusiasm is mutual.)

Tumblr.

Winter in the Canadian Rockies and Kootenays required a different approach.

Aside from some brief, frigid lake plunges, if I was outside, my best survival strategy was to become a Matryoshka doll of clothing layers. Thermal leggings. Heavy snow boots. Mittens thick enough to punch a bear. Even a very sexy balaclava.

Despite my Swiss blood, ya girl hasn't exactly been blessed with natural resistance to the cold.

My house in Nelson had no garden and the surrounding streets were either buried under snow or (usually) coated in a clingy grey-brown dust from the gravel they use to stop cars from sliding sideways down the hills³.

I would of course go for walks, but these were mostly tactical endeavours, sandwiched between the fireplace sits and couch reclines that largely made up my indoor time.

Ten minutes out, and my face would sting, my nose would run, my eyes would water. Not exactly the vibe for sitting on a park bench in a wind tunnel to contemplate the sky.

Thus winter passed, and it took me a while to realise that—short of letting my fingers freeze so I could touch the moss on a tree—at no point was I actually in direct contact with the Earth anymore.

Icarus, 1970. By Adger Cowans.

Relevant to this post: I’ve always been a physical person.

Touch-motivated, tactile, at home in my body—at least when my mind wasn’t trying to escape it.

I grew up in a warm, animated household with three younger siblings, forever bumping and leaning and sprawling over each other, our parents hugging us easily, like it was second nature. We were active and collaborative and affectionate.

Without writing an essay on it, I can say this much: the transition from playful chaos at home to the rigid isolation of the private all-girls school I attended was a complete shock to my system.

Lack of touch was far from the only factor that turned those years into a battlefield, but I do think it carved a fault line between my mind and my body—one that my teenage self spent years quietly waging war across, just trying to survive.

Until I fell in love with my best friend at the time.

And in the physical intimacy of that first relationship, I found a new portal for connection.

Tumblr.

Funnily enough, our relationship also marked the start of my recovery from the worst of my suicidal ideations, eating disorders, and depression. Not that it was just about touch and connection, but I know it played a significant part in bridging me back to myself.

Enough so that through my late teens and early twenties, I sought out touch as my main point of access to feeling like I belonged somewhere. Drawn to romantic partners where sex felt electric and intense, even if the rest of the relationship was a mess.

Because beyond the transcendence of sex itself, touch—being touched—made me feel grounded and embodied and connected. And hugs are not as easy to come by for young adults as they are for children.

There was also something particular about being held by a man, someone bigger and stronger than me with a steady heartbeat and wide arms that could wrap all the way around me, that settled my nervous system like nothing else.

Could make me feel so safe and content that it liquefied me.

I was hooked. And learning to untangle the unhealthy patterns there entwined with the good has been deep work.

Tumblr.

Now, we were talking about winter and being barefoot a moment ago, and I promise there’s a logical bridge here.

Because reflecting on how my body feels today—barefoot, in the sun, against the Earth—I’m noticing just how much touch and connection, even tactile pleasure, I’ve learned to draw from Nature.

I walked out from bed today to plant my bare feet in the grass. Groaned at the feel of it squishing between my toes, the wave of electricity discharging into the ground and spiralling back up into me.

Subtle, but clear.

This morning feet-on-ground reset + plug-in has been an innate part of my daily routine for years, and it’s the first time I’ve had to go without it for this long.

It’s made me realise I haven’t just been missing touch from a lover, from friends, through the fall and winter months. I’ve been missing the feeling of the world against my body.

The way lying in the grass settles my bones, lets me feel the Earth breathing.

How alive it feels when the wind runs its fingers through my hair or sunshine soaks into my skin.

The way climbing rocks and hearing them hum roots me all the way down to the planet’s core.

How flowing water wraps completely around me, containing me.

The spongy squish of moss. The texture of bark against my legs. Warm sand engulfing my ankles. Palm frond shadows cooling the back of my neck.

I hadn't understood just how much of my nervous system regulation—of my sense of belonging—comes from these everyday, ordinary, tactile connections with the living world.

It makes me wonder how much of the loneliness we feel in the winter isn’t about the darkness or the cold itself, but simply the ache of being cut off from the Earth.

Tumblr.

I know that connection to Nature was innate to me as a kid—forever rock scrambling and squishing through mud and building cubby houses out of sticks. I didn’t think twice about spending time outdoors or why it made me feel good, it was just where I wanted to be.

But I guess as I grew, my head and my calendar filled with other things. Schoolwork. City lights. Falling in love. New worlds to explore. Trying to figure it all out.

It’s been a conscious process for me these past few years to slow down and remember who I am, at my core. Spending more time alone, especially, has demanded it of me.

Because without the comfort and touch of other peoples’ worlds, I had to learn to find connection within my own.

And now it’s spring again, and everything is waking up, and I’m sitting here in the sun, bare feet on the ground, feeling my body light up.

And it’s made me want to take the time to write.

Just to anchor in this realisation in a tangible way and maybe spark something in you. A remembering of your own. A desire to reconnect, to go find a patch of good grass in the sun, and sink your feet in.

The Earth is my lover and I’m ready to be touched again.

by Embodied Alchemy

cover image by Martin Machaj

p.s. if you’d like to support my art, pour me a mug of cacao, or otherwise sprinkle some magic in my day, you can do so here 🐉🖤🍯

1. Which, FYI, should really be a non-negotiable for any winter-faring folks.

2. Bindis, for the uninitiated, are tiny spiky death-seeds that hide in the grass like ninja landmines, waiting to stab and impale the soles of your feet with the rage of a thousand Legos.

3. Very important. Nelson is one giant hill.