HANDS - PROSE AND POEMS

“The hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Michelangelo, the music of a Paganini.”
~ Friedrich Engels

“Now join your hands, and with your hands your hearts.”
~ William Shakespeare

“Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.”
~  Leonardo da Vinci

"All wisdom is contained in the capacity to sense with exultation this diligent hand."
~ Elemire Zolla

“Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.”
~ Carl Jung

“Hands are the heart’s landscape.”       
~ Pope John Paul II

“…the skin of this planet must be stretched,
the sea of its whiteness must be ironed
and the hands go and go,
the sacred surfaces are smoothed
and that’s the way things are made:
hands make the world each day,…”
~ Pablo Neruda

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand."
~ Henri Nouwen

"Writing by hand on paper is becoming a revolutionary act. Reading a physical book is becoming a revolutionary act. Protecting the books in our libraries, the arts and humanities in our colleges and universities is becoming a revolutionary act. Doing things with warm hand to warm hand, face to face, without photographing them, posting them, is becoming a revolutionary act.
Those two original digital devices you have at the end of your forearms are the means of resistance. As is eye-contact with the world instead of staring at your phone….
The most valuable thing you have is your attention. It’s also the most valuable condition for survival of the non-digital world."
~ Lynda Barry (and thanks Austin Kleon for sharing)

“Turns out, working with your hands can make you feel better. No surprise to those of us who like create in the kitchen, workshop, garden, or on paper. It's like a mantra for your hands. And maybe there's a link here with handwriting in a journal as opposed to typing in one...”
~ Linda DiBella

"Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world. And I fold them in prayer, and they draw from the heavens, light."
~ St. Francis of Assisi

Segment from collage by Julie Harper Lauterstein