People typically listen with their heads, attentive to logic and thought, or with their hearts, to feeling and insinuation. But there is also a frequently untapped ability to listen with one’s hands, as I recognized at a Susan Stark concert in Brunswick, Maine. There, two Quaker pastors from Kenya (themselves excellent, forceful singers) sat with arms flexed out before them, as if each held an invisible beach ball squeezed slowly. They were appraising the vibration of the room, the presence of Holy Spirit moving. This time, the current was plentiful and active. Try it, in public – at a governmental hearing, a poetry reading, a concert or play, a sporting event – and you, too, may observe how the sense of each occasion may differ. Watch a master carpenter or a first-rate baker, as well, to see how hands ponder a task, running ahead of mental comprehension. A musician often seems to hear music through the fingers, as if playing, even when no instrument is present. Perhaps a surgeon does the same with medicine.
These poems celebrate the movement of Spirit perceived through a Third Ear, between the hands. The tactile response. Here’s one:
~*~
TO USE TOOLS
Connect
four fingers and thumb
sometimes, double
into the fire, and out
a pot, a pan, or a skillet
with or without a lid
and its handle
extending to a blade
or straw, depending:
All the wonder of the work at hand
cooking, keeping house,
gardening, splitting wood –
to say nothing of the factory,
farm, boat, or mine –
hunting or warring –
Even basic parts we touch
with each other
Poem copyright 2017 by Jnana Hodson
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