see with your hands

It probably happened a million times when I was kid: someone would show me a shiny new something, and, inevitably, I'd reach for it and they'd snatch it back, singing,

See with your eyes, not with your hands.

Make that two million times if you count the times I sang that out myself, at others' outreached hands.

Do what I may: it's undeniable. I learn with my hands. I do actually need to see with my hands and with my eyes. It doesn't matter if it's a sparkly ring on a friend or colleague's hand, or a newt in the woods, or a tail-less iridescent-bellied dead baby lizard on the trail, I have to pick things up, turn them in my hands, to fully comprehend, with more senses, all that is before me.

If you follow me on Instagram, then you know how true this is: there are many pictures of me holding stuff. But it goes back way farther than that technology, whether it's me hugging a baby alligator in Florida or me with dead moles in my suitcase (oh, they're so soft and precious) at summer camp, age 10.

It's like I can't fully really and truly see unless I engage more senses, step across the divide that separates me from this Other by touching.

I guess I need to get my hands dirty, get them in the mix.

It reminds me of a puzzling thing my mother said to me recently, while we lived under the same roof in France for over two weeks. She said to me, "You know, it's funny. I just realized something about you. [pause] I always thought you were such an intellectual. [pause]  But now I see that you're really very hands-on."  Naturally, I'm paraphrasing because I admit that at every [pause], I held my breath a bit, absolutely no idea what was coming next, braced for the kick. At  the first opportunity, I transcribed it in my notebook, eager to remember it, also then touching it, by creating the looping letters on the page, getting to know it deeply.

Writing is another way of seeing with my hands, whether it's via the keyboard or with my beloved mechanical pencil in the pages of my annual book.

Words help me see.

What my mother meant was, I discovered, intended as a compliment, I think. That I should know how to raise food and bees, for example, something I was distinctly *not* taught by my city-dweller parents, is evidence of my hands-on-ness. I got totally hung up on this notion that it should be somehow remarkable -- i.e, in the real sense of the word, out of the ordinary and worthy of notice or remark -- that I should know something that they hadn't taught me. There's a kink in there, but that's another story.

The hands-on-ness is totally true, though it shouldn't, after 50 years of knowing me, be a surprise.

For me, getting my hands in the dirt or in fur or whatever it is that's before me is about bridging that divide from purely intellectual to real knowledge at the physical, almost cellular, level. It really and truly is how I learn, by not keeping my distance, getting close and intimate, dirt under my nails, smells in my nose, not all pleasant, but full of something that is not, and never will be, me, except for in this way that using my hands brings me closer, lets me experience it and for a moment be one.

I wouldn't, honestly, have it any other way. I wouldn't know how. It's liberating to know it, that I see with my hands, to freely drop to my knees to look at something closely, turn it lovingly every which way and take it in with every available sense.

Sometimes, on my knees, it feels like more than just seeing with my eyes. It's an adoration.

Sure, seeing naturally starts with the eyes. But once the hands are in it, at least for me, then the heart is not far behind. 

XX

Comments

[Collette]

Nice closing, A!