Mixed media photo encaustic hand-painted with pan pastels. On wooden board. 7.5" x 7.5"
With these hands, she has held onto time, cooing softly and nuzzling it against her breast. She felt its heart pulse with a never-tiring force, it’s drum beat forever always moving forward. Such a curious notion. Don’t things that only move in one direction circle back around? Doesn’t everything that ages eventually become young again? Doesn’t every single day begin anew?
Time responded with the only words in its unimaginative vocabulary… tick, tock.
With these hands, she has cradled babies— and lovers too. She has stroked and soothed and smoothed and their fears away. She has dried their tears with the softest kisses. Don’t you weep, little baby. Her hands remember the diameter of your wrist, the curve of your ankle bone, the sweet ripeness of your belly. Her hands remember the flow of electricity, under and over currents rippling between you, the first time you touched her, ever so slightly, with the fleshy pad of your index finger.
With these hands, she has buried her dead on the hillside near the clearing in the woods— baby birds and bunnies, Siamese cats, Persian cats, tabby cats, and a couple of faithful dogs. She has buried her elders, as is the natural order of things. She has laid to rest the traumas that have left their marks, planting lilies of the valley at their headstones. With these hands, she has buried a child on a cloudy April day, when her white roses unexpectedly turned pink. Her hands have known the hardness, the coldness, of the rocky soil in winter. They have wielded pick-axe and shovel, and when necessary, sword.
Her hands know when it’s time to sever and move forward.
These hands keep her tethered to the earth. She has untangled fragile roots and transplanted mosses and bare roses and tender seedlings on drizzly spring days, her hair hanging down in ropes, catching in the branches of the overarching willow tree. She has harvested dandelion seeds and collected sacs of cottonwood fluff to stuff her bed pillows. She has picked wild blackberries from thickets lining the forest path, gathered stinging nettles in early spring, hunted hens of the woods in the fall. She has wrapped her arms around the giant oaks as they whispered secrets and sang songs they learned from the wind.
She has cupped her hands to drink from the river of forgiveness.
These hands have given flight to her imagination. A wellspring flows through them, draping her in a veil of words and colors and the softest impressions. Memories of things once forgotten surface again, an unexplainable knowing unfolds. The old ways push up through the bedrock of generations, doorways to the infinite. In her hands, she holds the key. Every threshold is an invitation to cross over.
In the end, her hands offer themselves up to this essential truth:
In the space of eternity, the ticking of the clock means absolutely nothing.
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