Have you thanked your skin today, or even noticed it?
Orion magazine has an article by Andrea Jones titled "Identity's Edge." The last paragraph says this.
"It is convenient to think of the human birthday suit as a membrane that separates, preserving the boundary between self and not-self. But from the moment your parental gametes linked their half-strands of DNA to form the zygote that would develop into you, everything you now claim as yourself has been derived from matter and information imported across your body's external membrane. The world may be full of things that slash, nibble, pierce, abrade, infect, and sear, but it is also replete with oxygen, sunlight, chocolate, laughter, the color of leaves in autumn, the smell of fresh-baked bread, the twining of bodies under the covers on a winter's night. Skin differentiates but does not isolate. Your singular existence unfolds within it, but skin does not hold the universe at bay. Instead it marks the seam that joins your existence to everything else."
Again, this is something to comtemplate this day before New Year's Eve. Jane and I continue to discuss the book. Today, she suggests we need more about who we were "before." I realize I don't know who I was before. So much has gone in and come out at this point, that I feel new. I am new for this New Year!! I am Now!