Birthing and Rebirthing

Tags

art, Birth, Childbirth, Evolution, Parent, photography, Tree of Life

My granddaughter was born a few days ago and my heart fell apart.

There’s something so  breathtakingly tender, and heartbreakingly sweet, in the newly born.

We’re astounded again and again by the miracle of life, the birthing of a brand new being, although its occurrence  is older than eons, as common as pollen dust carried on butterfly wings, more numerous than grains of sand washed by countless waves, more prolific than the bursting of billions of stars.

Even so, each tiny finger, each soft sigh, each rose petal ear, seems a miracle that melts us.

How did she, do we, come to be? Is there ever an end to our becoming? Was there a beginning?

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” writes Wordsworth in “Intimations of Immortality. “Not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.”

And this is but an echo of Shakespeare’s thought, in saying that “we are such stuff as dreams are made on: and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

When the morning stars first sang together, did we sing with them, as scripture implies?

Is our “little life” the whole round of creation, beginning with the birth of the cosmos, as so beautifully imagined in the film The Tree of Life?

Do bursting stars and the splitting of a single human egg, each set into motion a whole panorama of evolving life?

All I know is that the whole world was changed with the birth of this child.  A whole new universe of possibilities was opened up.

Her birth forged bonds and relationships that will forever be a part of our becoming.

The birthing of a child is the rebirthing of man as a father, woman as mother, parents as papa and nana. Another child becomes brother or sister, siblings become aunties and uncles.  A whole new set of relationships and shared histories evolves.

No one is quite the same as before.  Nothing will ever be again as it was.  The whole universe is slightly skewed to make room for this one child and infinite number of changing possibilities that occurs with her birth.

They say the stirring of a butterfly wing can set into motion a string of events that lead to the creation of a hurricane of the other side of the planet.  Surely the birth of a child must have an ever more stirring effect on the remaking of the world.

We live in a universe of relationships in which everything is connected to and influenced by its surroundings. We are all tumbling together in the wash of time and space, breaking against and polishing each other.  Shedding what we were in becoming what we will be.

What if all we are is a constantly becoming with no end in sight, with endless sights and sounds and relationships and experiences to sculpt and renew us? Birthing and rebirthing each other, over and over, ad infinitum, en potentia.

It’s not hard to imagine.  After all, I remember not at all my time in my mother’s womb.  Huge potions of my childhood self are largely forgotten, sloughed off as I became something new.  The woman I was as a young lover, a new mother, I am no more.

The strands of my becoming are still unfolding, surprising me day by day, even as this newborn child breaks my heart and takes my breath away.

We hold each other in our gaze and see faraway in each other’s eyes our own evolving selves.

A brand new thing has burst upon the world in the birthing of my granddaughter, and nothing will be the same again.

But I cannot help believe that in some deep and unfathomable way she is not new at all. She has lain in wait in the womb of the universe, tucked away in the folds of time and space with the singing stars, quietly biding her time as the world evolved around her leading to the very moment when she emerged into our midst and recreated us anew, her very presence here a rebirthing of us all.

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Night Howls

Tags

human consciousness, Nature, Pago Pago, poetry, sailing, Tree of Life, universe, wild

Silver Moonlight, by Steven Richardson

Last month around this time when the moon was full, our nights were filled with howling. Almost every night we could hear the mournful cries of coyotes in the fields behind our house, along with ecstatic barking, yipping, chortling–as if they were celebrating a kill, or worshipping the moon, or engaged in some wild orgy.  Or perhaps they were merely giving voice to the irresistible life force pumping through their blood and brains and hearts, a force of nature too wild and fierce to hold back.  

The sound, terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, echoed long in my mind afterwards, like ripples of water moving away to the edge of consciousness and reverberating back again. Like something heard long ago deep in my bones, from an evolutionary or primal past.

They say we humans carry in our genes the imprint of life-forms going back to when the first cells emerged on earth.  Deep in our blood, our bones, our very atoms, lays some faint memory of our ancient beginnings. Phylogenists call it our “vast evolutionary tree.”

If we go back even further, traces of that time when the morning stars first sang together may still be felt when we look out on the night sky. We are the stuff of stars, after all, so say astrophysicists. 

Carl Jung envisioned our Collective Unconscious as a reservoir lying deep within our psyches containing our evolutionary memories.  While they lay below consciousness, they break through in dreams and myths and fairy tales, in primitive urges, the call of the wild, in our more-than-human yearnings.

Beautiful Rage by Steve Richardson

Sometimes we feel this wildness rising within when witnessing powerful displays of nature: thunderstorms booming across the land, waterfalls careening over cliffs, huge waves crashing against rocks, hurricanes lashing at trees, lightening forking across a dark sky,  earthquakes heaving beneath our feet.   It frightens and excites—creating both the desire to escape and to embrace that primordial power.  One wild howl elicits another—the urge to howl back, to voice our own wild yearnings—to sing or dance, or paint or play, or grab words from the air and fling them onto paper.I heard that howl and answered back one night on anchor watch in Pago Pago.  A hurricane was blowing a few miles off Samoa and we were set to ride it out if it blew into the bay. 

I stood at the bow of La Gitana, hanging onto the staysail as the deck lurched beneath my feet like a wild stallion while the surging waves rose and fell and the chain from the anchor rooted deep in the mud below grew slack or tight.

Storm Clouds and Moonlight by Steve Richardson

Overhead a torrent of clouds crashed against a full moon, sometimes swallowing it whole, then washing away streaming moonlight. All around me the night raged while the anchor held tight, and I held tight, the terror and exhilaration pumping through my blood and brain.  The wild urge to let go and be carried away by the night was fierce. Later I tried to capture what it felt like.   Here’s what I wrote:

Night Howl

(Anchor watch in Pago Pago, Samoa)

Alone beneath a wild and ragged night I watch,

                            moonlight and clouds wind-tangled across the sky.

Suddenly I am loosened, lifted, flung far–

fingers raking stars, mouth howling moon, mind mooning time

my heart-beat

riddles the universe.

Alone beneath a wild and ragged night I stand, astonished,

gaping into the maw of some vast mirror.

It’s close to capturing what I felt, but the last two lines trouble me. “Gaping” and “maw” keeps the visceral effect I’m looking for, capturing the sense of trance-like awe and terror.  But mirror moves it away into something more philosophical or intellectual. 

I’m tempted to stop with the line “my heartbeat riddles the universe.” That captures the physicality of my wildly beating heart breaking out of my body to become the heart-beat of the universe.  And it also hints at the mystery of human heartbeat itself being a riddle, the riddle of the universe, that the evolution of the universe over eons led to the creation of a human being, whose heart—its essential being—is the ability to reflect back upon the universe, to take it all in. 

Human consciousness is the mirror through which the universe sees and knows itself, and through which we see and know ourselves—the fullness of being, our primal past and present standing face to face.

That’s a lot to howl about.

[Many thanks to Steve Richardson for permission to use photos of his oil paintings to illustrate this post.  You can find more of his work at his website.]