by Kelly

Chapter 41 of the book, Haiku Mind, discusses the idea of vulnerability.

The topic didn’t immediately pull me in. I’ll admit that I read the opening haiku and the entire first page in a zone. I was experiencing an afternoon lull and even though I was reading, I was  thinking ahead to what I might eat for dinner. Not even the act of turning the page was enough to snap me out of my numbed state.

But then I hit these words: “skin-ship”. I woke up, grabbed my highlighter and colored seven lines.

Skin-ship, according to author Patricia Donegan, is a term used to describe a very close relationship between two people, a relationship that is so close that the two people have bathed together.

While bathing, she says, we are naked, warm, soft and quiet. We have gone back to a “primordial state” and feel “at home.” This is a kind of relationship we have with only a very few.

I am going to make a confession here: Alison and I have a skin-ship.

Yes, yes. It’s true. We have bathed together, although the experience wasn’t as supple or as sexy as some might imagine.

Our bathing-together experience was the complete opposite of everything Donegan describes. It was awkward, outrageous, foreign, uncomfortable and borderline abusive. Wait. It wasn’t borderline. It was abusive.

It occurred at the Russian-Turkish Bath House in New York City. We were whipped with bunches of hot, soapy leaves and then thrown into an icy pool. Afterwards, I had scabs on my nipples.

The whole thing had been Alison’s idea. I agreed, very willingly I might add, to tag along. If I was going to get naked and beaten with leaves, Alison seemed like the perfect companion. And she was. I can’t imagine having lived that experience with anyone but her.

That’s because Alison and I had a skin-ship long before we entered those bath house doors.

Our skin-ship, though, wasn’t born from joint bathing. It was born from travel.

While the act of bathing is a practice in vulnerability, so too is travel. Especially foreign travel, and especially solo foreign travel — and even more so if you are a woman.

And that’s how Alison and I met.

It’s commonly said that the strongest relationships are built on trust.

But trust needs vulnerability in order to exist. The two are kind of a chicken-and-egg situation. It’s hard to say which comes first.

What I do know is this: When I met Alison, I was extremely vulnerable. So was she. We were both far from home, and we were both in need of a friend, and it is because of this, because of how our relationship began, that we have a skin-ship.

In fact, if I stop to consider my inner circle, the people I trust most, turn to most often, with whom I allow myself to be most vulnerable, the people with whom I would say I have a skin-ship, I find that travel is the root of several of these relationships.

While Donegan argues joint bathing is a cause of skin-ship, I’m going to venture out on my own and say that, at least for me in my life, travel has been the greatest catalyst in forging skin-ships.

Find Haiku Mind on Amazon:
Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart

“Skin-ship” idea excerpted from Haiku Mind by Patricia Donegan, (c) 2008. Published by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston. www.Shambhala.com.