I saw her come in today, and she looked like she had been put together by a committee. It was hard to love her. I could hear the lurching lack of coordination as she opened the outer door and thudded into the hall. She had a strange, indescribable scent to her that was old and uncared for like a house that hasn’t been cleaned. It was difficult to feel who she really was, how she thought, what she wanted, where she was headed.

Her skin was dry and slightly scaly to the touch. Her legs wore a dark stubble of a three-day old shave. She had a most pronounced pattern of being caught wide in the hips with bowed legs and a narrow chest and her arms and head hung from the first and second thoracic like a heavy coat on a hook caught and struggling to find some freedom from inside. What other language than a touch to organize deeply could have reached her I don’t know, and she had tried many. The first session was difficult, for I could not get past her constant extrinsic movement. The second session something shifted. Like a distant walkie talkie full of static, we somehow made a connection. I reached in deeply and called loudly to the “line” and felt a faint voice answer back through the fascia under my hands. “I hear you! Over here! Help me!” That faint cry in her being was all I needed to mobilize whatever talent and strength I had. The “line” is universal and what hangs around it is individual. Hands talking through the fascia to the “line” is a universal language and can touch a person through the worst of outer circumstances. That kind of communication – that kind of hope that tells the core of a being who has somewhere given up, that there is another possibility for being – even if only for an instant, that is enough to keep me going for a long time. She walked out still looking like she’d been put together by a committee, but there was a new awareness in her of a new possibility of organization and balance – that somewhere in that strange jumble of unrelated parts, was a core of being that was hers. We both felt better.