Every time I look at this flower it makes me think of a hand, with the palm turned upwards, and the fingers curved upwards.
At first glance that looks like a grasping movement. As if the fingers are about to enclose whatever they touch. This is the essential function of our left cerebral hemisphere. It literally allows us to grasp things. It controls the right side of the body, and, in right hand dominant people that’s the very gesture we make when we trying to get a hold of something. We curl our fingers up and make a fist….not so much the kind of fist we’d use to fight with, but the kind of fist we’d use to hold something tight. So, this is how we “get a grip”, how we “get a hold on…” something.
This grasping or gripping is a kind of understanding, isn’t it? Once we say we grasp something we are able to say we understand it. We make sense of it. And once we get a grip, we get hold of something and control it, or possess it.
But what if the movement of the petals, and so the fingers, is in the opposite direction?
What if, rather than curling up to make a fist, or to grasp, the fingers are opening?
What then? How does that feel different? Try it now for yourself. Turn your hand, palm upwards, and make a fist. Now relax your fingers and thumb and allow them to open up the way the petals of a flower unfurl and open up. How does that feel?
It’s quite different, huh? As we turn our hand into a crucible, or a cup, of offering, it feels as if we are seeking to connect, gesturing to say to someone, or to the world, “here you are”, or, alternatively, that we are ready to receive.
Two gestures, one of grasping, one of offering – offering to connect.
Both are necessary, of course, but maybe this is a time for more offering, less grasping?
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