[credit: MASK (BUK, KRAR, OR KARA), Torres Strait Islander, mid to late 19th century.]
True Connection
This could be a battered old mixing spoon, plastic handle singed no one remembers when, that your mother reached for whenever a bowl of this and that needed mixing. A touch would pass across the years between you two whenever you pulled it from the drawer.
Mindful of this feeling I confront this New Guinea mask on the New York Met site and understand the singing depths of human culture in how little touch the mask can convey to me. I read that it’s worn in a ceremony to pass a dead person into another world. My family has never danced for its dead.
Your muscles probably mimic how your mother held a bowl and stirred. Same muscles probably have never carved designs in wood.