Hug the Cactus

I love hugs.  It hasn’t always been the case.  When I was a freshman in high school, I was assigned a mentor and every time the two of us would meet she would embrace me in a tight hug.  I know that she felt me cringe underneath her arms, yet she continued to leave me with a warm hug.  As time passed and affection towards her started to form, her hugs seemed like a healing balm. One day after a couple years of knowing her, I told her that she taught me to like hugs.  She surprised me when she answered, “I knew signs of outward affection made you uncomfortable, I also knew that you hadn’t been taught to hug. Now you know how and you can teach others, starting with your family.”  I left her car that day, and thought about learning to hug.  Is that for real?  Does one learn to hug, it doesn’t just naturally happen?   

My family at the time was in crisis due to alcoholism and poverty – meeting the basic needs was the priority and signs of affection were probably not even on the radar.  Yet, I had been given a mission and I started to hug, first my mom who has always been my dearest.  As I gained confidence I started doing so with my siblings and eventually my dad.  My mentor helped me tap into a world that we had dismissed due to the hardships in everyday life.  Those early hugs began to chip away at the tough skin our life had made.  It was awkward to hug people I knew so well because it wasn’t our norm, but slowly we became huggers.  While we might still be working on giving really tight embraces, we are a family that hugs!

Recently, I was listening to priest talk about the division in our country and he said that the best advice he had for times like these was to hug the cactus.  There’s a lot of people like freshman me, who life has given them blows and those blows create pricks in our skin that makes us difficult to love.  I know from my own experiences with that strange white woman who loved to hug me.  She saw beneath all my defenses a kid in need of love and not words of affection, but the actions of a warm embrace.  She felt my pricks when she hugged me, but persevered knowing that love overcomes hate.  She was the first person I confided in about why I didn’t trust people to touch me and through her example showed me that good people exist. People who do things like help a barrio kid learn to hug without expecting anything in return.  She embraced me when I was a cactus and now at every chance, I play it forward giving affection especially to the cacti that God places in my walk. Heal the world embrace the cactus!