This Hand is My Hand, This Hand is Your Hand...

Hand to Hand directed by Tamás Wormser of Quebec
A baby’s grasp, a lover’s caress, an athlete’s grip, a dancer’s gesture, a craftsman’s touch: hands shape our world. A sensuous visual odyssey following our ever-moving hands, Hand to Hand is a poetic celebration of our quintessential tool.

Faces of the Hand by Tamas Wormser, National Film Board of Canada

I was delighted to discover this short film 'Hand to Hand' today about, what else, 'hands' which was commissioned by CODE Motion Pictures and posted by the Cultural Olympiad on their Winter Olympics Site. It explores the motion and emotion of the hands.

Though there are no shots of hands gracefully placing stones into any dry stone walls, there is a lot of hand-thinking going on. The whole film is carefully 'handcrafted' to express much of the impressions and ideas that I hope this blog has successfully begun to explore in the last month and a half since I started posting thoughts about Thinking With My Hands.

I am posting the link to this film here today in support of the Canadian Winter Olympics which are now in full swing in Vancouver . It seems fitting too, since today I am flying to Victoria B.C. where I'm sure the Olympic fever is spilling over from la 'main' land.

Let's all have a hand in this.

Hello

How are you doing?

I want to officially invite you to join me here at this wonderful new place in cyberspace called

'Thinking With My Hands'

This is a daily blog venture continuing along the lines of the www.dswa.ca website 'articles' postings, which are accessible online if you are DSWAC member

Basically it is thoughts on 'stones', and working with stones, and exploring why it makes people feel so good to build these things called 'dry stone walls' .

We have an opportunity here to add to these ideas and develop an understanding of what it means to ' think with one's hands '.

I will be coming at this from many different directions, in order to have a better 'grasp' of what is implied by the phrase...not just typing with your hands, not signing or gesturing or even feeling around by hand, with eyes closed, but actually thinking with, and through, our hands as we build things with stones!

I hope to be more specific about all this as my hands tell my brain the kinds of things that need to be written, instead of the other way around.

This is just to get a foot in the door, so to speak, and also to invite you all to have a hand in this project too.

Im certainly going to be here. Talking a lot, but I hope you come too and tell me what your thoughts are... thoughts not just in your head, but in your hands as well.

So thanks in advance for your 'comments' and enabling this blog to be interactive and even more thought provoking.

John