Now that I am starting to emerge from the fog of exhaustion, and before memory of all this fades into oblivion, I want to set down in words a note of appreciation for my wife Sarah, who, with absolute tirelessness and courage; meticulous, PhD-caliber baby research; and, above all, a super-abundance of maternal love (and milk), gave our little Eliot a most loving welcome to life on this otherwise fraught and troubled planet.
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Now, having freshly rubbed the sleep from my eyes, allow me to backtrack and recount that moment.
It was very much as Sylvia Plath describes it:
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Took its place among the elements.
I shall never forget the way his body slithered out of the womb, silent and unliving in that second before his face touched air, and then, like a spark encountering oxygen, a sudden combustion and a piercing yawp as his lungs ignited into life! A moment so awe-inspiring that hospital rooms are suddenly seen not as a sterile, clinical place, but a vortex connecting the living and the non-living, a site of miraculous abiogenesis, and the literal River Styx upon which the recently deceased are ushered away and the newly born are brought hither.
The trite (when put in words) but powerful (when experienced) thought that: if only everyone on earth experienced, truly and deeply, the wonder of their child coming into the world, they would cease all designs for inflicting death and pain. Like carnivores who lose their appetites in seeing whence their meat came, so murderers must pause if they observed this ordained mechanism for the coming-about of life and what would be entailed in its undoing.
Gazing into a newborn's face is like watching clouds pass in the sky. The newborn is the only kind of homo sapiens that is capable of living purely in the moment, whose expressions are unmediated by thought and anxiety. Their little faces are unfiltered windows into their every sensation, changing like weather or the passing of seasons, leaving no trace of the past. Newborns evince the Original Zen of essential humanity. Original Sin, in contrast, does not seem so original after all (arriving later in the kindergarten era, perhaps).
As readers of my previous blog will understand, I had spent much of my life fighting that fear of "being ordinary", that aversion to thinking ordinary thoughts, that disdain for living an "ordinary" life. Suffice it to say that fatherhood (among other events) has finally and irrevocably puts those fears to rest -- more to come on this later.
Now, a simpleton animal myself, I ape my creature offspring who is pure instinct, and I pray the simple prayer of Khalil Gibran, that great prophet of Hallmark greeting cards (whom I am no longer embarrassed to quote):
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
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