Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.

Dear God,
I am so afraid to open my clenched fists!
Who will I be when I have nothing left to hold on to?
Who will I be when I stand before you with empty hands?
Please help me to gradually open my hands
and to discover that I am not what I own,
but what you want to give me.

The past was like a handful of sand you thought you were squeezing tightly, but which had already run out through the cracks between your fingers.

I jammed my hand in my jacket pocket, bracing myself for the next hit, and feel something. Something grainy and small, sticking to the tips of my fingers: the sand from Commons Park.

If you open your hand, you may receive everything.

Crawling on your knees through the desert sand. Your dress is torn and blood on your hand. The Southern Cross, a giant tower of light. Your silhouette, your laughter - then your bite! I feel real.

To hold, you must first open your hand. Let go

Martin, if dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!

Slowly he lifted his hands in the darkness and held them in mid-air, the fingers spread weakly open. If he reached out with his hands, and if his hands were electric wires, and if his heart were a battery giving life and fire to those hands, and if he reached out with his hands and touched other people, reached out through these stone walls and felt other hands connected with other hearts -- if he did that, would there be a reply, a shock?

Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror up to where you're bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as bird wings.

I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams...

Stretch forth thine hand.

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

You could fall suddenly into the void the dead go to: I would be comforted if you would bequeath me your hands. Only your hands would continue to exist, detached from you, unexplainable like those of marble gods turned into the dust and the limestone of their own tomb. They would survive your actions, the wretched bodies they caressed. They would no longer serve as intermediaries between you and things: they themselves would be changed into things. Innocent again now, since you would no longer be there to turn them into your accomplices, sad like greyhounds without masters, disconcerted like archangels to whom no god gives orders, your useless hands would rest on the lap of darkness. Your open hands incapable of giving or taking the slightest joy would have let me slump like a broken doll. I kiss the wrists of these indifferent hands you will no longer pull away from mine: I stroke the blue artery, the blood column that once spurted continuously like a fountain from the ground of your heart. With little sobs of contentment, I rest my head like a child between these palms filled with the stars, the crosses, the precipices of my previous fate.