a poem + a wish
Thank you for reading (en)WOMBED, a love letter of sorts exploring the ways we can cultivate artful participation and attentive witness to Life by embracing the full spectrum of our humanity and listening to the inner voice Thomas Merton called the soft voice, the gentle voice, the merciful and feminine. Feel free to share it with whomever you think would benefit from, enjoy, or feel deliciously challenged by these ideas.
Gorgeous Souls,
I am so privileged to share this space with you. As your responses come in, i feel a renewed courage that the small voice we cast into the abyss flies back to us fuller and richer, its resonances wilder, more intricate and alive because it has joined with other voices, other beating hearts.
As you consider supporting my work and joining this community of storytellers and re-wilded beings, know that you matter, and that it is for you that this writing is here and not in a notebook at home.
Thank you.
In honor of this week, and with a forthcoming essay (stay tuned!) on love and mortality (since the forces of culture clashed with those of religion yesterday) that is writing itself at a glacial pace, i offer this in the meantime, the first poem i composed after the birth of our second daughter, who is now seven months. It is more spoken word than traditional poetry, so i hope you will listen to my reading it to you.
New My baby, i marvel at the skin that’s known no impact yet -- the cold, the hard object, the blossoming of blue around the wound. I marvel at the eyes that see for the first time, unfettered by meaning or association, no language yet to mar how the world gets into your bones. How you take it all in for the first time is a kind of a resurrection – the grass blade, the waxy grape crayon, cello chords plucked slowly, your body the instrument with no object correlation, (or objective correlative for that matter – forgive me, i cannot help myself) by which i mean pure sensation and the rise within you in beholding something new. To you everything is new. It’s a bit as when the midwife pulled you from the water and placed you on my chest. A baptism of iron and salt, your smooshed face silent and unmoving. She kept massaging your purple body, maybe more blue first, and i kept asking “is she here? Is she here?” for the three seconds it took for your skin to turn peony, to turn rose, to turn you every delicate shade of relief only breath can bring. In those seconds i beheld you in awe, in fear, in the dark of my own lack of understanding, the smallness and solidity of you pressed against my breast, your knee pushing into my ribs, the unmoving quiet. I beheld you as something entirely new before baby, or infant, or even your sacred names were uttered, it was this body against mine, the feel of anemone, and the bottom silt of everything around us reduced to the benthic sound of ocean. Then, you were not daughter or girl or human. Then, you were everything and everyone to me, you were my very self, split into husk and seed. And as the midwife rubbed your back vigorously and i locked my arms so your slippery form wouldn’t loosen from me, you were as alien as this world may seem to you each day, everything new. Everything a beginning. And my own life started in that first inhalation, the way you choked out amniotic waters and drew in a different substance. My elemental creature, I was reborn in the rhythm of your lungs pressed against my open palms.
My wish, dear ones, so powerfully felt today and every day is that we may find our way back to beginner’s mind, to the gracious and true seeing of a child (true because it is steeped in love, wonder, and openness).
May we firstly gaze upon our selves this way, and in doing so turn toward our beloveds and bestow on them the dignity of distinct being(ness).
May Love make your seeing luminous!
