A funny thing happened in my fourth week of obsessive hand washing. The act of washing my hands stopped being an interruption, a chore, a necessary but perfunctory ritual, and became a comfort. Suddenly, washing my hands became self care, massage, healing touch. At a time when I haven’t been in the same room as another person for longer than I care to think about, washing my hands has become a means of human connection, even though I am the only human present in this space.
In her beautiful poem “A Hand,” Jane Hirshfield describes all the things a hand is not, suggesting that a hand is more than the utilitarian appendage we mostly take for granted. “A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question,” she says.
Turning my own hands upward, I feel my vulnerable self opening to that question—and while it may vary from person to person, from moment to moment, or from hand to hand, today that question, for me, is: with whom am I connected when my hands are empty?
A Hand
by Jane HirshfieldA hand is not four fingers and a thumb.
Nor is it palm and knuckles,
not ligaments or the fat’s yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page,
not on the ecstatic body.Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping—
not sponge of rising yeast-bread,
not rotor pin’s smoothness,
not ink.The maple’s green hands do not cup
the proliferant rain.
What empties itself falls into the place that is open.A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.
Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.
—Jenifer Hanson, Prairiewoods director