The Space Between

Hands might be the answer.

Busy hands, but not the kind of busy that means answering emails or important spreadsheets or to do lists. The kind of busy that can be put off and lasts more than a minute and takes just enough space in your brain to squish out all the other junk. If the whole world started knitting or whittling or painting or cooking, maybe the noise would hush and the pollution would clear like those 3 weeks when everyone just stopped in 2020, and maybe all those billions of brains on this planet would find their quiet and their peace and their best ideas, and maybe that’s when the world would tip back the right way.

Hands.

It would be difficult for me to work a sewing machine, especially with that bobbin remaining one of the world’s greatest swear-worthy maddening mysteries to me, but my hands find it incredibly soothing to sew a rip, tightly pulling two pieces together. Typically it looks terrible, but a blind person might find it vaguely satisfactory and a practical person who would rather their couch cushion not have a hole, even if it means a rather Frankensteinian scar across its side, might still nod their approval. Perhaps a slight grimace, but they’ll see it got the job done. Once I delighted in sewing a hole in my husband’s sweatpants shut. My hands were busy; in and out went the purposeful needle; the thread pulled taut; pants inside-out so the thread knots and such wouldn’t show. Content and proud, I turned them right-side in for him to try on. Somehow I sewed the pocket shut completely. It solved the hole problem, at least, and he did my favorite kind of laugh, the one where his eyes squeeze shut and he doubles over and can’t get his breath. So it wasn’t a complete waste, the sewing task. And I still look forward to mending a rip. I hope to one day take an embroidery class and see if small colorful flowers fare better than sweatpants pockets in my hands.

I read that peeling potatoes is when some of our most creative ideas hit. Carrots too, I would imagine. Maybe apples, but I’ve never gotten that perfect whole-apple curl down like my grandmother.

A guitar is also not my forte, and yet, I love holding one. Holding things in general is soothing, to wrap one’s arms around. A guitar loves being held too, as long as the feeling is mutual.  For me, it is. Pressing my fingers on the correct strings to create the correct sound for the correct chord. My voice has never known how to do this – the sounds or the chords. My hands are endlessly awkward, but more trainable. G to C. C to D and back again. E and A taught by friends, whose basement is filled with at least 17 guitars and framed gig prints and records and art and gentle lights and sounds they’ve woven into songs. Back to G and C. Most folk songs follow some sort of path around these simple configurations of appendages, and so comfort does too. For me at least. I always strum a little off. But when it’s just you in a chair looking outside at trees or rain or birds or the walking neighbor instead of at a phone, a perfect strum isn’t really a necessity.

It might be hard to tell from this pile of words, but typing strings of sentences is where I do know how to strum, where something in me spills out from my hands easily. Trying is usually not a part of it. Cleaning up, more often, because this is the sort of brain that always spills a little extra.

But typing is where talking is what happens. Whereas peeling or strumming or sewing or digging or building or cleaning or drawing or braiding, that’s when a quiet switch flips, and everything kind of settles. The noise and the dust and the circles of worries and all the extra. For someone who could use more time to listen, more quiet to listen, it’s good. It’s needed. I love what I hear within when that happens.

Anyway. Hands I think.

(beautiful painting by AJ Eccles, aka mom)