Spiritual Practice - Looking For Circles On My Fingers
Tomorrow, November 2nd, is not just known as Day of the Dead, it is also a lesser known celebration Looking for Circles Day , a day for going outside, preferably with kids in tow, to look for circles. It is a day I enjoy celebrating every year , and often walk around my garden looking for circles I have not noticed before.
This year I looked no further than my hands for the circles that caught my attention. The whorls that make up my fingerprints fascinated me, and then I realized that the fine parallel lines that form unique patterns on the ends of my fingers also cover the palms of my hands and also my feet.
Fingerprints are unique to primates …. And koalas!!! Gorillas, monkeys and chimpanzees we understand as we are all closely related, but koalas are more closely related to kangaroos and wombats so why fingerprints that are indistinguishable from human prints?
So why do we have fingerprints anyway? Evidently its all about grasping. The combination of ridges, furrows and sweat glands maximizes the friction between the skin and whatever surface you want to touch, regardless of whether it’s wet or dry, which is jolly useful if you don’t want to drop a slippery wet eucalyptus leaf you’ve just gone out of your way to grab.
In Whorls Apart: the Genetics of Fingerprints on the Genetics Society Podcast, Dr Sally Le Page explains that its not just about grip either: “Your fingertips are among the most sensitive parts of the body, packed with nerve endings that detect the vibrations you make when you run the corrugated skin over a surface. The parallel ridges in your fingerprints have perfectly coevolved with your vibration sensors - Pacinian corpuscles if you want to give them their proper name - as the spacing between the ridges and furrows amplifies the narrow range of vibrations the sensors can detect. All this combined means your fingertips can detect objects as small as 40 micrometres or half the width of a human hair. Every single time you run your hands through your hair, your fingerprints are performing a feat of microscopic engineering.”
There are three main patterns in fingerprints: arches where the lines flow left to right in an arching pattern; loops, where the lines start to form an arch but then turn around and double back on themselves; and whorls where the lines go round and round in circles. We are still not sure why these patterns form and are so unique, but it has been postulated, that fingerprints are shaped by the different stretching and elongating forces as a foetus’s hand grows in the womb. According to the Genetic Society podcast “This means our fingerprints are like an archival record, tracing the stages our hands went through from a smooth round bump poking out from an embryo to a complex machine of muscle and sinew with five unique protuberances that can curl and flex.”
These whorls or circle patterns on our hands enable us to perform microscopic miracles, they also tell you who we were before we were even born. Wow. Who would have thought that Looking for Circles Day could provide such an incredible example of how fearfully and wonderfully made we are. I have spent half the day rubbing my fingers together, looking closely at my fingerprints and thanking God for this revelation.
Take some time today to pay attention to your hands. Don’t just glance at them, but really examine them. A magnifying glass might help, but even if you don’t have one, look closely at the fine parallel lines that form unique patterns not only on the ends of your fingers, but also over the palm of your hand and the soles of your feet. Run your finger along the deep creases that interrupt this intricate design when you form a fist. Now move the thumb of one hand slowly over the fingertips of the other, across the swirling lines perforated by microscopic sweat glands, feeling the sensitivity of those tips so important to your ability to grasp tiny objects. Finally run your fingers over a table surface and then pick up a tiny object like a pin or a piece of thread.
Sit and contemplate the wonder of the pattern on your fingers. Press your finger onto some sellotape or similar sticky surface and look at the unique print that is formed, an identifying stamp, left on everything you touch that says “I was here”.
What is God saying to you through your time of contemplation?