Blog o’ Gnosis

Several months ago, my friend Rabbit emailed me while I was in Wales, attending my sister’s birth. He asked me to write something about my hands. Tonight, cleaning out my email caches, I found my reply. I think it is worthy of posting, so here it is:

My hands aim more directly now. I could say it is from aikido practice, where there is constant observation of whether your hands are pointing where your body is pointing, and training them to be in alignment. But I think it is most likely also from that wonderful territory known as middle age. Middle age for a woman is a tremendously freeing landscape, where you’ve managed to escape the expectations placed on younger women, but have not yet been relegated to the irrelevancy of old age. You can still surprise people, and in fact often do, especially with self-assuredness and the sudden realization (on their part) that you know more, perceive more, about the situation than they do. You can go from unnoticed in one minute to an ultimate authority in the next. Maybe my hands led me there, or maybe their straightforwardness is a result of this happy accumulation of, as we used to say in the 80s, power.

An example: I reach across the couch to place my hand on my sister’s pregnant belly, feeling her baby move. I may do it with hesitancy, or uncertainty, or maybe just on a whim. But my hand does it deliberately, purposefully, and comes away with knowledge that the rest of me has to leap forward to catch. It’s exhilarating, keeping up with my hands these days, a little like having my super-cape in my back pocket, waiting for the inevitable phone booth transformation.

I have also started wearing rings on my fingers. As a pianist and guitarist, my hands have always been the part of me that is an instrument, and as I searched for clarity of expression through them I also kept them mostly free of ornament. Suddenly, some weeks ago, I decided to try silver rings of various shapes on as many fingers as I could fill and still like the effect. I’ve got just three of the ten occupied so far, but I’ll only wear ones that strike my fancy. I’ve got one that’s a piscean double spiral, joined at the middle, another that is a slim band of scrollwork bordered by two solid lines, and yet another that holds a rounded garnet in a bed of vines.

What I notice today is that my hands are happy, and work themselves into shapes I hadn’t considered before. There’s a gracefulness about them that works nicely with their newfound authority. I enjoy watching my hands, wondering how they will surprise me next. In fact, it is a surprise to find I have anything notable to say about my hands at all, but there it is. Surprising, and joyful.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 23rd, 2005 at 9:11 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.