Skindeep
A tale of common ancestry and ecomythology of skin in two voices
This poem was woven by Telma G. Laurentino and Sofia Batalha as a synchronizing invitation for the mammal bodies attending the “Mythic Monster Ecology” workshop at the “Becoming Monster Festival”.
Welcome to your mammal body.
Touch your skin.
Feel its biodiverse textures, the ridges of your knuckles, the lifelines in your palms, the fur naming you mammal, the nails offering protection and tool.
Look closely at those beautiful patterns etched on you by the pores that ensure that even within your skin, you remain permeable to the ecosystem.
Gently unfurl the mythic psyche and unfold the ecological soul. Feel its pulsating breath on your skin. A warm breeze will flow from the inside out.
Your skin tingles in remembrance.
Behold, the largest organ in the human body, the skin that defines the boundaries of “you” is the one with which you touch the Earth.
Your skin is your conversation with the weather, it feels temperature and regulates wellbeing, keeping in the warmth in winter, sweating out the heat in summer, just enough, ensuring that all the water necessary to life remains inside.
Your skin knows before you know that your hand must be pulled away from the flame; Tells you about pressure, itching, pain, and pleasure…
At its thickest, it is but millimeters deep, but make no mistake, “Skindeep” has nothing superficial about it.
Your skin tells the tales of being ecosystem, of belonging to the deep time of common ancestry, and of entanglement with ever-changing life cycles.
Your skin remembers being covered in feathers, being warmed by fur, protected by scales, and even being bark or mineral.
Your skin carries primal tingling resonances.
Let her sing her stories.
Every minute, you shed between 30 and 40 thousand skin cells.
Every 28 days your skin renews itself by migrating cells from deeper epidermic layers to the surface, where they become fortified by keratin and protect you from disease. That safe-keeping keratinized state is their final stop before they tumble from your body to rejoin other life cycles.
Shedding skins and shapeshifting are a common thread in folklore and myths.
Morphing into other shapes, skins, and bodies echoes the seasonal changes of the landscape is an ancient cartography of body and place.
Collective wisdom for being-with and living-through.
But you must expand your idea of safety. Your skin is porous boundary, not imperial wall.
Do not think of your skin as isolation from the ecosystem, no. It is an ecosystem in itself: floor to a microbiome of millions of bacteria, fungi and virus that live in you, with you, as you.
Your skin is full of microenvironments, habitats that differ in sunlight exposure, pH, temperature, humidity, antimicrobial sweat content, sebum concentration and topography. In each habitat offered through your skin, microorganisms have evolved to adapt to that little part of you, which is their entire world.
But worry not, for they know how to live in reciprocity with their ecosystem: in making you their home, they keep disease away, they educate your immune system to recognize threats. When there is balance, they live from and for you.
Slowly follow the path of a wrinkle or a scar with your finger. Any crease or fold in your skin…
Tenderly track its contour, map its story, and name its crevices.
Allow yourself to witness your body topography through the different textures of your skin and various temperatures, from damp to dry, from tender and soft to rough or scabby.
May your skin know your body topography.
Your life-cycle is deeply interlaced with the life of millions of microorganisms, and the paragraphs of your DNA that tell your body how to make skin hold the (hi)story of common ancestry with millions of other species.
When the keratinized cells flake from you into the world, you are regenerating and shedding 13.8 billion years of (hi)stories. That is the time passed since the Big Bang.
Can you feel the biodiversity in your skin's textures?
The different surfaces and consistency?
Soft to rough, crackled or elastic?
Gently touch deep-cosmic-time in your skin.
Where does Stardust live?
The alpha-keratin that makes hair, fur, wool, horns, nails, claws and the epidermis layer of mammalian skin is also star-made Hydrogen, Oxigen, Carbon, Nitrogen who found themselves assembled into the sensitive skin of your feet, the clopping hoofs of horses, the shedding antlers of moose, the baleen of whales, the slime of hagfish, the amphibian skin of frogs, the silverback of gorillas.
With a different arrangement of atoms, keratin slithers on soil and flies through the skies. beta-Keratin makes the strong, desiccation-proof scales of reptiles and the wonderous feathers of birds.
May you spin, embroil, knit, crochet, weave, and thread your skin mantle. Again and again.
May this rich living mantle assist in your shape-shifting through and with life. Over and over.
May you sense the world through its symbiotic touch.
The common ancestor of all vertebrates on Earth had the recipe for this molecular wonder written in its DNA. Your skin is alive with ancestral ecological shapeshifting power.
From that shared beginning evolved all the astounding biodiversity of skins that we see, that we pet, that we dream about, that we steal.
Our entanglement with every single expression of life to ever exist is not metaphorical, it is skin-deep.
Our kinship to Earth is not philosophical, it is skin-deep.
Our relationships with ecosystems are not severed, they are skin-deep.
There is belonging woven onto your skin.
No matter how many imperial, oppressive, miss-constructs may try to deny it.
Your connection to all life is sovereign in your skin pores.
No matter how much empire tries to separate you.
We hugged ourselves in deep devotion to our diverse skins, in gratitude to all the living cloths, and for their wisdom. To all they hold and release.
This poem was woven by Telma G. Laurentino and Sofia Batalha as a synchronizing invitation for the mammal bodies attending the “Mythic Monster Ecology” workshop at the “Becoming Monster Festival”.
Sources for the science of skin microbiome and keratin:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279255/
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro.2017.157
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279255/
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5sb7q6jp
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4264316/
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