Happy Birthday Govinda!

Last night Aaron and I talked about a little boy's very first year with us. A boy that was born because the moon needed him here. We sat around reminiscing about his earliest nights. Aaron said, "He would let me hold him, love him, dance with him. He transformed me."

He had a purple hand, it stayed that way for weeks. He was our biggest baby. A happy one. He was silent and sweet. Not so quiet these days, but Govinda still seems to be coated with candy.

He spends most of his time in an automobile, whether is truly exists for not. He is also a mechanic. The yellow and green wooden tools compete to hold his interest, but Govinda finds his dad's tools to be more entertaining. Rusty tools and the dangerously sharp, pointy ones. He operates on his baby dolls with them; he's a doctor also. He frightens me.

He tries his hardest to emulate his eldest boys. He yells at Judah a lot. He doesn't want help putting his shoes on anymore. He adores his baby sister.

He wears mittens in the summer. He looks for the moon at night.

What I remembered last night was simply his touch. There is a succession of Zen Masters who are linked together by transmission of mind, pure thought transferred from mind to mind with no words. We tend to dwell so little on our whole range of sensory perceptors and receptors that our touch feels bland compared to what it would feel like if our awareness was one hundred percent. I remember Govi's "original touch", as Ina May Gaskin refers to it. She says that a baby born blind doesn't lose his original touch because he can't afford to pull his attention out of his skin and out of his hands when he gets so much of his information about the Universe this way. Govinda reminds me to hold on to my original touch. He is alive and electric. And I hope that he stays close forever.

Happy Birthday Govinda Hare!