Tag: hands

Miracle. All of it.

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The next time you look into the mirror, just look at the way the ears rest next to the head; look at the way the hairline grows; think of all the little bones in your wrist. It is a miracle. And the dance is a celebration of that miracle.

— Martha Graham, Blood Memory: An Autobiography

Notes:

  • Quote Source Credit via Alive on All Channels. Thank you Beth.
  • Photo: Alexander Yakovlev – Dancers Frozen in Flour via FreeYork
  • Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.

Miracle. All of it.

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Some transfer of significance has occurred: I feel it, feel the air move, feel time begin to pour down a new tributary. The world adjusts itself. The doctors hold the baby up over the screen so that I can see her. She is livid and blue and her face is a rictus of shock and fear. I recognise her immediately from the scan. Only I knew the secret of her tranquillity, the floating world of her gestation. She is borne off to the far side of the room, away from me, and as if she were a light I fall deeper into shadow the further away she goes. The midwives crowd around her. I lose sight of her but her cries reach me like messages. Presently she emerges clothed and wrapped in a blanket. Her father takes her and holds her. His offers of friendship must suffice, must compensate for her lack of proper passage, for the clock of experience has started ticking and won’t wait for me. Her life has begun.

~ Rachel Cusk, ”A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother”

Notes:

  • Rachel Cusk’s book was named #16 in The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by the The New York Times (June 26, 2019)
  • Post inspired by: “The boys don’t wear mittens anymore. Their feet are much bigger than mine… But I still miss their baby feet, and their patter, and the piffle of childhood. I reel at a baby’s cry. I swoon at strollers. I don’t understand why all the love songs aren’t about babies. ~ Jill Lepore, “The Lingering of Loss” in The New Yorker (July 1, 2019) (Thank you Sawsan)
  • Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
  • Photo – Hand-in-Hand by J’ ose

Miracle. All of It.

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“The hospital corridors were quiet, the midwife was quiet. She whispered—that’s how I remember it—that I needed to see the doctor and have an ultrasound. She helped me gather my things and sent us even farther down the corridor. I remember lying on the doctor’s examining table in a dark cubicle, only the ultrasound machine emitting light. I remember covering my face with my hands. After a while, the doctor touched my arm. “Look,” he said. My husband took my hand in his. The doctor pointed at the screen and moved his finger carefully around the sonogram, as though showing us a rare map, and then, because we couldn’t quite believe what we were seeing and what he was telling us, he turned up the sound so we could hear the steady beating of the heart…”

~ Linn Ullmann, ”Unquiet: A Novel” (W. W. Norton & Company, January 15, 2019)

Notes:

  • Photo of sonogram: Kim Pham
  • Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
  • Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Sunday Morning

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What was precious—flexing.
Fingers wrapping bottle, jar,
fluent weave of tendon, bone, and nerve.
To grip a handle, lift a bag of books,
button simply, fold a card—…

Unthinking movement, come again.
These days of slow reknitting…
Thank your ankles, thank your wrists.
How many gifts have we not named?

~ Naomi Shihab Nye, from “Broken” in Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners 

Poem: Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels. Photo via seemore

How many of us can say this about our work?

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‘Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse,” the sociologist Richard Sennett has observed, “the desire to do a job well for its own sake.” That human impulse reverberates like a hammer bang throughout Ole Thorstensen’s “Making Things Right,” a swift and understated examination of a life spent working with one’s hands.

Mr. Thorstensen, a savvy and matter-of-fact master carpenter from Norway, tells the story of a loft renovation in an Oslo home built in 1890, from the initial bid to the final job-site tidy. Chapters start with hellos to the family on Monday morning and end with the straightening and organizing before quitting time on Friday, bringing us along as the work moves from architectural drawings through demolition, framing, boarding, venting, window installation, fire-stopping, tiling, plumbing, painting and finish work, from the fast and brutal to the painstaking and meticulous.

“There is nothing mysterious about skilled manual labor,” Mr. Thorstensen writes. And he does well to demystify the trades. The work is not magic—a matter of tools and time, patience, practice and desire…The book is, at its core, about relationships—between carpenter and co-workers, architects, engineers; between carpenter and client; and ultimately between worker and work. Mr. Thorstensen writes beautifully of the simple pleasure of carrying a load with someone: “To hold one end of something heavy and be aware of another’s movements, feel them transmitted through the object, is an experience all its own . . . it is a good way to get to know one another.” …

Mr. Thorstensen shares the timeworn concern that people these days are divorced from material reality and have little interest in how their pants were sewn, chickens slaughtered, shelves built. “I sometimes wonder if it has affected our idea of time.” … He makes a case for the pleasure in starting with nothing and ending with something, for a life spent accumulating experience, and he’s attentive to details large and small, like the way music sounds better on the radio once a room is insulated. “I would like to be reborn a tradesman many times in a row with my experience intact,” he writes, wishing only for a new back each time. How many of us can say this about our work?

~ Nina MacLaughlin, Making Things Right’ Review: How to Build a Life (WSJ, May 3, 2018). A book review of a Norwegian carpenter’s step-by-step account of home renovation, alongside a paean to craftsmanship and working with one’s hands.

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