What these hands do?
Hoping you're holding well, Community,
With permission from my guides, I share this message they offered to me, which felt right to offer to you:
You know the way. You’ve always known the way. Call us in to hold your hand as you walk it. Squeeze our hands tight (we won’t break). Grip as hard as you’d like and need to. We won’t shutter, nor leave you. Your grip is not too tight for us.
What you may not realize, First name / friend, is that your guides, your first loves, hold you just the same. An unwavering grip on your life. This is the message for all of life, truly.
Sitting with a comrade the other day, tracing the winding curves of our spiritual walks, I looked down at my hands and was returned to a transmission I received years ago. For my graduation presentation in my coaching program, back in 2017, I projected an image of my younger self onto the wall. This Staten Island Advance article clipping captured me after I recited Maya Angelou's poem, "Still I Rise."
I knelt down, bowing to this little me, and invited my cohort, nine months of shared tears and awakening between us, to encircle me and lay their hands on me as I read a note to my little self. A note and a prayer to fortify her life, and a prayer I was speaking over the body of my then-self. I was traveling through time to whisper into her ear as she navigated the first confusions of her identity and her voice. I wanted to offer her something to steady herself. And to steady the walk I was just beginning.
I am reminded of Octavia Butler's protagonist Dana, in Kindred. Dana is a Black woman in 1970s California who travels through time to the antebellum South, caught between freedom and enslavement. Whenever she feels a leap begin, her hands reach for something to hold onto. Something to steady her. She cannot control when the leaps come. So she reaches, for something to grip her, reach her, meet her.
Last week, I traveled to the present-day South of Charlotte, North Carolina, where my hands squeezed relief into the hips of another friend as she moved through labor. Eighteen years of friendship holding the pain and frustration that filled her body and the room, as we tried to move through our unaddressed silences of the last decade, all while safely ushering her firstborn into this earth. A blessing. A new life prayed for and met, after four days of induced labor.
What do these hands do, First name / my love?
Can you take a moment to look at yours? Lay them on the floor, the earth. Raise them to the sky, the air. Rest them on your heart. Place the palms together. Bow to the inner you and the essence held in this body. What is the prayer held here? As you travel across these particles of moments, trust the hands are holding you. You will not be lost.
Give the prayer, the hymns of your heart and the breath of your life, room to reach you. Give time for the prayer to reach your kin. Give time.
Hold fast to the hands that hold you. And remember, they do not break.
For Your Inquiry
Enter into your sanctuary, a moment of silence, and just listen. What is found here? Who is found here? Listen to the murmurs and write, draw, move, or create without ceasing.
Listen: A divinely timed episode from September: A Podcast For Loveships, "I Love Every Age Of You." A 24-minute invitation by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Sangodare Wallace to contemplate age and time in relationships.
Contemplate: What trust awaits you in the exchange of being held, held for, held down, held up, held by?
I'm listening to what comes up for you.
Until we meet again.
