The Intimacy of the Mouth

"The mouth is a sacred and intimate portal." We take our food and drink through the mouth, we communicate through the mouth, we share intimacy through the mouth. The mouth is the most intimate part of the face.  It is also the most intimate part of our bodies that we don't cover up. Through it and with it, we allow others to see into ourselves.

As dental health professionals, we are permitted into that intimate place - sometimes that privilege is granted easily, many times not. In order to better understand why patients may be apprehensive and sometimes hostile to oral care, it is worth exploring the intimacy aspect of our mouths.  In thinking about this and doing some reading, I realized that while there is consensus and acknowledgement among dental health professionals that oral care intrudes in no small way on personal intimacy, there is little written about it. I did find a fascinating theological article entitled Kisses of the Mouth, however, which captures the intimacy of the mouth brilliantly. I have partly quoted and partly paraphrased, and reposted here:

Traditionally, the eyes are the window to the soul, but you can’t see into me in any real sense when I open my eyes. You might try to peer up my nostrils, or into my ear, but pretty quickly it gets too gloomy and dark to see much. When I open my mouth, though, there’s a yawning chasm in the middle of my head, and without too much trouble you can see well into my interior.......

The mouth is, of course, the entry for food into our digestive tract, and thus the gateway for bringing nourishment to the whole body. We drink water through the mouth, and we take in air. The mouth is thus the main way we take the world into ourselves from outside-it is the main delivery system through which the world outside keeps us alive. The mouth is guarded by the lips, but the lips are backed up by teeth.Saliva, mucous, vomit, carbon dioxide and other "essences" can escape through the mouth, but it is not limited to palpable physical material.   Ideas, aspirations, compliments, songs, prayers, laments, screams and shrieks, and many other expressions of our interior life move to the outside world through our mouth. 

The mouth is the most expressive part of the face. Without the mouth, our interior life would be much less precisely expressible. 


You can gesture and dance, but, for all their expressiveness, these modes of communication cannot express our desires or thoughts as articulately as the mouth. 

  

 



The mouth is particularly sensitive - not only to touch, but inextricably linked to the nose to perceive taste,texture and aroma. A kiss is a synaesthetic symphony. The taste and the smell of two breaths mingle into one. It is touch, lips against other lips, and it is touch on a highly sensitive part of the skin. 

My take-home thought for the day: 

Whether you realize it or are in tune with it or not, our inner world steps through the doorway of the mouth and presents itself to those around us in a rather intimate way ..... all the more reason to take care of it.