Looks like this is Anatomy week, all right, Wednesday the head, today the hand, though I guess every week is Anatomy week with these hands doing such delicate work all the time; with these sensitive feet forever analyzing the terrain and reporting back so we don’t keep falling over…
I spent two days this week on airplanes where my own hands were sure taxed, especially while yanking that 20-pound computer bag out from under the seat. They hurt a lot these days so I’m aware of them more. It’s why I had to stop practicing massage. During one of the Deep Tissue workshops I took while studying muscular therapy the teacher told me I had to build up more hand strength. I wasn’t ever able to do that. I also realize now that I leaned in on them too much as I made my way down the back of whoever was on my table. The result after just four years: I could no longer bear the pain of working on people.
If I only I could have massaged them with my mind! I’m thinking of that scene in the 1985 movie Cocoon when the Steve Guttenberg character is talking to the beautiful alien in the indoor pool where the space-pods first opened and asks her what making love is like on her planet. In reply she has him stand at the opposite end from her, then sends this ray of light across the water which caroms around off the walls and ceilings until it lands Pow! right in his chest. His head is thrown back and he smiles ecstatically, the camera pans away to the outside of the building and you can just barely hear him saying “If this is foreplay I’m a dead man!”
Maybe we humans are just the foreplay too. A humbling thought for all those Genesis readers out there raised on the belief that we humans were the crown of creation. Us the crown of creation? Us Nature’s best final project? We’re probably just one of Her rough sketches.
Now watch this trailer and tell me it isn’t great – not just Tahnee Welch’s face in the love-making scene but what Wilfred Brimley says to his young grandson:
EXIT ONLY 