Source: Donato, Amber Prison
Have you ever found yourself just looking at your hands?
Marveling at the beauty, simplicity, utility, and the fleshly humanity of them?
You take your hands through your entire life.
The hand that touched your mothers breast while nursing is the same hand that you hold a cigarette with, is the same hand you hit your brother with, is the same hand that you wipe your ass with, is the same hand that you shake hands with, is the same hand that you let go with.
These are your hands…you have them your entire life… I imagine that these hands somehow retain in them a record of every good and evil thing I have done with them.
As a therapist these hands that hold a record of my existence go with me into the depths of other people. It is into the world of the other that I go with these hands. They are my link, my path, my trail of crumbs out of the labyrinth of the unknown. But while in those depths they are also the tool with which I unveil, I overturn, I disturb, I caress, and I hold the things that need to be held, the things that no one else will hold, the things that seem impossible to hold.
These hands do that work.
These hands touch that which is most sacred and that which is most defiled. These hands somehow endure the work. These hands, these absurdly animalistic paws are called on to hold pure gold and they are asked to hold the darkness of death.
How is it that I have been given these hands? Who am I to have been given these hands? What have I done to be so blessed and so cursed? Why could I not have been like the birds of the air they do not sow or reap? Why could I not have been made a flower of the field, they do not labor or spin? Why give me these hands?! Why give me the knowledge of good and evil?! Why give me a heart and a soul? Why make me infinite in a finite world? These hands are too much and not enough.
I was the first to touch my son when he came into this world.
As he was crowning and as my wife labored the midwife told me to touch him. I did not know him and I did not know myself but it is with these hands that my knowing began. And I pray that I know him all the days of my life.
I did not ask for these hands…I did not ask for this life…and yet they are mine. I know not why. But it is by the sweat of my brow that I will eat my food until I return to the earth since from it I was taken, for I am dust and to dust I shall return.