28 Comments
User's avatar
Simply Nola's avatar

Love it!

Fractals of Gaia 🌿's avatar

Thank you so much for reading! 😁🌹

John Sheils's avatar

Such a great piece. Your fine writer.

Fractals of Gaia 🌿's avatar

Thank you! Your so appreciated! 🤗🌹

Fly Fishing with Neil's avatar

Great post! The physical sensation I have missed the most in those times in my life when I've been alone is "touch."

Fractals of Gaia 🌿's avatar

Yeah, touch is extremely regulating for our nervous systems. 🤗

Old Codger Steve's avatar

As I scroll down using the fingers of my hand, I'm aware that these ( the whole series, really)

has lit, fired up my thought processes. Hmmm

Your posts ( whole series)

Fascinating intriguing quite exhilerating really

I will leave your latest post read later once I have read and fully contemplated these

It's not the time it takes to read its reflecting and absorbing them

Serious research and connections you make I really like

One thought I recall reading a while ago so would need to check it out. Vegans note perhaps. It was our eating of meat that amongst other things that helped our brains grow.

Not entirely relevant I know.Just a thought

Also wished to attach a photograph from a recent hospital appointment of a large wooden sort of statue . a circle of linked open hands. Healing hands appropriate there. Thought you might like . Not sure how to attach. Thicko here durr.

I was going to restack anyway and know how to attach there.

williamphaynes/elliott's avatar

I'll 'hand' you this you weave an interesting tale

Megan Youngmee's avatar

beautifully written. I uncovered a healing methodology that physiologically drains toxins from the hands. neck and shoulder issues, heart stuff. lung issues. lymph notes... a place to receive.. a place to let go. when we unlock the hands and feet. the rest of the body follows.

Fractals of Gaia 🌿's avatar

That's incredible!! I would love to know more! It's wondrous how the body is interconnected with the mind and the environment!

Megan Youngmee's avatar

Yeesss. all of this. I share bits through my writings, and then have a lot of free stuff and guided stuff on. youtube. and then I break it all down quite simply on my little shop through some courses and offer one on one session and then hold Lives where I do guided work for free with the community here on Substack.

It came about by me studying and reverse engineering the bodily energy, tingles, twitches itches and meditating for 15 years with it with my guides to truly understand it after i left a huge corporate career... where I found out very first hand that the medical industrial complex was a total farse from seeing it too close ....

Fractals of Gaia 🌿's avatar

I'm genuinely amazed!! I will check it all out! I'm very interested in all of it

Megan Youngmee's avatar

If you want to see the overview course I have it here. ;https://stan.store/meganyoungmee. then free stuff is here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB_1gcu31_v1B546jaBwRrXpVg4TtY7AU

Vlad Tverdohleb's avatar

I enjoyed this because it points to something we often overlook. What feels "magical" is frequently the result of a quality of presence rather than a supernatural event. When someone is deeply attentive, coherent, and genuinely with us, ordinary moments can become extraordinary. Perhaps the real magic isn't that reality changes, but that our way of relating to it does.

Fractals of Gaia 🌿's avatar

Definitely!! It's always perspective 😊

Vlad Tverdohleb's avatar

Exactly. And perhaps perspective is not just a way of seeing, but a state of being.

When our inner state changes, the same world reveals different possibilities. Nothing external may have changed, yet the relationship between observer and experience has. That, to me, is where the deepest transformations begin.

Fractals of Gaia 🌿's avatar

I completely agree 100% I might actually write about this particular thing in the near future! It's such an interesting relationship between what is perceived and what is known and what we see in them

Vlad Tverdohleb's avatar

That's the thread worth following. The relationship between perception and being is not one-way. You don't just see the world. You participate in it. And when your state changes, the world reorganizes around that shift. Not because the world changed, but because your participation in it did.

The deepest transformations are not about changing the external. They're about changing the relationship to it. And that relationship is a state of being, not just a perspective.

I'd read that piece when you write it.

Eva  Smitte's avatar

So interesting and profound! We really take some of the most essential things for granted, don’t we? P.S. Here’s one of my favourite emojis - 🤦🏻‍♀️ lol

Fractals of Gaia 🌿's avatar

Lol this one is mines recently 🫣 yeah our bodies are literally everything we know but we feel we are above them. I know I operated that way for a long time till I started really realizing things

Douglas L. Peck's avatar

I love how you describe "the vocabulary of touch." Your illustrations are wonderful. The essay is well thought out and a pleasure to read. It is an honor to present it in The Crown Valley Quarterly (I hope you like how I presented it): https://liveyosemite.wordpress.com/2026/07/02/crown-valley-quarterly/

Fractals of Gaia 🌿's avatar

Wow!! I'm so so honoured!! Thank you so much for your support Douglas this really made my day today 🙏🏻

Legend's avatar

Great piece. I really enjoyed reading it, and love how you articulated the meanings of the hand. Thank you, I learned a lot.

Fractals of Gaia 🌿's avatar

Thank you so much for reading!! I'm really glad u enjoyed it! 🙏🏻🌹

Mark Crutchfield's avatar

Love this piece, Fractals. The way you write has such a lovely pace and tone to it. It feels like a Saturday morning coffee and cake conversation, where we both look at our hands to see what we can find. The historical element is lovely too, and the tie-in to religion and spiritualism works and blends perfectly.

Fractals of Gaia 🌿's avatar

Thank you Mark! I'm really glad you enjoyed the piece. 🙏🏻

Quinlin Hewitt's avatar

A remarkable meditation. Damn, your observation that language itself preserves a fossil record of the hand🔥. That insight bridges anthropology, symbolism, and spirituality in a way very few writers attempt. As someone who has spent years studying the esoteric traditions surrounding the hand, I found myself reading this through the lens of palmistry and mudras. The ancients rarely viewed the hand as a passive tool. They regarded it as condensed biography. Every mount, every finger, every crease represented consciousness crystallized into form. The hand creates the world, yes, but it also records the creator. Your progression toward fire felt inevitable. Fire may well have been humanity's first great extension of the hand, but I suspect the hand itself was our first altar. Every blessing, oath, healing, covenant, and work of creation passed through it long before temples ever rose from the earth.

Your essay left me with two questions. If our language preserves the archaeology of the hand, could the palm itself preserve the archaeology of consciousness? In other words, are the lines of the hand less a prediction of fate than a living manuscript of accumulated intention?

And because you beautifully connected the hand with fire, have you ever considered whether the traditional elemental associations of the fingers, thumb as Fire, index as Air, middle as Ether or Saturn, ring as Sun or Earth depending on the school, little finger as Water or Mercury, may represent humanity's oldest surviving map of embodied cosmology rather than mere symbolic correspondence?

Beautiful work. You reminded your readers that the hand does far more than shape the world. It quietly reveals the one doing the shaping.

Solomon Grim~ Everybody's brother🙏

Fractals of Gaia 🌿's avatar

"Your essay left me with two questions. If our language preserves the archaeology of the hand, could the palm itself preserve the archaeology of consciousness? In other words, are the lines of the hand less a prediction of fate than a living manuscript of accumulated intention?"

You know what's really interesting here, is I've had this theory that everything physical about us is a manifestation of everything energetic and mental going on and is reinforced by behaviour. I think palm readers and also psychics in general are super human pattern recognition machines. Basically the geniuses of pattern recognition and therefore can look at someone, thier hand, thier face, the posture of the body and immediately somehow tie the dots on what it is that's going on about them. And the more details you get into like different fingers and lines and specific wrinkles on the face the more you get deeper into the persons energy. Think about how the smaller we go into physics the more we know about the universe and chemistry and thus life.

The other part of what you said on specific fingers corresponding to different elements definitely resonates. I would not be surprised we have different elements even to the different parts of the fingers themsleves one by one. I know this stuff gets really really deep. What always shocks me is how did people know this? Fascinating

Thank u so much for reading! 💕 I've got to look into more of what you commented on too, lots to explore!