Saturday, October 15, 2011

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!

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Happy Birthday Haile!

When Haile came home she was still dead asleep. After spending those vampire days with her in the NICU, I didn't quite feel like her mother. I had to bring her home from such a horrid place, a hospital. All we could do, for lithless weeks, was figure out a way to wake her up. The hospital gave us a bunch of plastic bottles and told us where to find powder. I felt like I had never been a home-birth mother.


We fed her with a dropper, drop by drop, the purest of pure. And sometimes we had to give in, mix powder, for Haile would only fall deeper into that distant sleep upon her mother.


We gave her her time and we watched her shine.

Last week she gained her first 'war wound'; busted lip, swollen mouth, crusty scabs, and all. That's what she gets for playin' around with a bunch of ruffian boys all day.


I've watched her steal their food, she makes Govi cry sometimes. She plays their games, I hear her laugh when they try to scare her with wicked masks. I've caught her leaving home a few times. No more preemie, that Haile holds her ground.


She shared with us, something that baby boys, born at home with their comfortable start, had never shared with us. Her womb world.


In that maze of exhausted days, we couldn't imagine who she might become in a year. A scrumptious peach and a twinkling little star. Lotus blossom.


Thank you for sharing your womb world with us.


Our blessed little empress eye.


Happiest of birthdays, dearest Haile.




Haile at nine months