Hands, Reaching

Consider the splayed human hand, dipped in ochre or paint and pressed against any firm surface-cave wall, church wall, school wall, rock wall. … this universal hand mark … presented at full stretch … is radiant, reaching out from its singular base to establish the eternally mysterious space of just where it is. It confirms presence while not engaged or proclaimed in directing or manipulating anything at all. It is empty-handed presence.
    —Susan Murphy

How can it be that we only live once— 

the body constantly wishing for 

what only the hands can do: reach 

and grasp, reach and grasp. Something 

like the foaling of eternity, born 

and reborn on spindles. 

    —Keetje Kuipers

NOTES

—Hand prints on stone, Owens River Valley, Inyo County, CA. Photos: DB, 2026

—Keetje Kuipers, from the poem For All The Dead Lovelies from her collection The Keys to The Jail (2014)

—Susan Murphy, an Australian Zen teacher, from A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis — Teachings on Earth, Mind & Not Knowing (2023). 

—Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, June 1944. From Mon Cher Amour: The Love Letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès, 1944–1959 (trans from the French, 2026)

CODA

When someone has a soul, they tend to call what frustrates them lucidity, and what eludes them, truth. But that lucidity is just as blind as anything else. There is only one type of clairvoyance: the kind that wants to grasp at happiness. And I know that, even though it might be short-lived, endangered or fragile, happiness awaits us, if we reach out our hands. But we must reach out our hands. 

    —Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, June 1944.

(Maria Casarès and Albert Camus met in Paris on June 6, 1944, the day the Allies landed in Normandy. She was 21; he was 30. His last letter to her was December 30, 1959. On January 4, 1960 Albert Camus was killed in a car accident on his way back to Paris.)