Hands On

I am literally trying to get a grip on stuff -- trying to make my hand recover strong, fast, and hard.  Of course,  trying isn't necessarily the best way to do this, but I am at that border line where, after 4 months, my hand is weakened.  I have to get moving.  It has to be strong to support and direct me as I wheel.

And that is where this post is coming from.  As I do the band reps and ball squeezes and newspaper scrunching finger movements, I've been thinking about the value of my hand as I wheel and the difference for my hand between wheeling and dancing.  I've been working to separate my hand from my arm and delicately exploring what my hands do when they aren't simple mobility/locomotion mechanisms.

I like my hands.  I think of them as expressive.  They have years and years of musical training and with all that work came a variety of fine motor skills -- some of which I still have, some of which not so much.  I've noticed that they have aged and that the skin folds and textures appeal to me: When I was younger, I didn't think they would.  I like the way my hands look, though I don't often paint my nails or decorate my fingers with rings.

But I also know that wheeling affects my hands.  It's not just the broken nails and dirt (no, I can't keep my hands on the rims -- the fit of my chair isn't quite right -- and when dancing I like the extra precision of having a hand on the wheel).  It's also the tension and semi-contracture that comes from wheeling.  How to explain.  There's a moment in a one piece where we tip over backwards and lie on the floor, wheeled butts up and arms outstretched.  I'd like to be able to get my hands on the floor and relax in such a way that my fingers touch the floor.  But most of the time, they won't.  They can't.  They are too curled up from wheeling.  In most situations, this isn't a problem.  Some body work and they come back.  But in that moment, my dance is changed.  Instead of feeling outstretched, yet relaxed and supported, I feel myself rising away from the floor.  It's a very different feeling.

So, yes, there is an importance to my hands.  In an earlier, well more like proto, start to this post, I wrote that  "I experience my hands as anchors -- points of stability that rein in my wheels."  I meant that I should begin considering my hands as alive in themselves instead of as intersections between my arm and the wheels.  A wise friend wrote back, putting it much better than I could have: "Anchoring is an interesting way to consider hands when they're often describing the greatest motion and acceleration. What happens to balance and quality of movement if we make hands bases of contact?"

Yes.  Yes.  And yes.  Since then, I've been testing how my hands feel on wheels and rims.  They are no longer passively "describing" or getting dragged along behind the momentum of the wheel.  I have begun to think of them as a person with their own sensibilities and needs.  My grip changes not because a particular action requires a different grip, but because the expression and experience of my hands is changing.  I am beginning to allow my hands to have an expressive quality when they are on the wheel not just while they are striking the wheel or while they are in the air.

This is new stuff.  I hope to be able to test it in the coming weeks as I go back to full time dancing.  Fingers crossed; hands interlocked.