There is a tiny little picture I snapped of my daughter a few heart beats after she was born. I titled the photograph “three minutes old”. I can see that grainy image in full flip-phone level picture clarity any time I want by just thinking about it. That really is a bookmarked end of my daughter’s life. A perspective she has no conscious memory of but I sure do. That silly little indecisive blue and pink one-size-fits-all cap on her head. Those powerful lungs (thankfully!) crying out as she was so rudely plucked from the safety and comfort of her home and thrust quite literally into the light. She was born in that moment. She died in that moment as well. Her innocence and complete dependance died. My (and of course her mother’s!) childhood ended. Our parental connection to the world was born.
That first breath is the first “step”. Separation from the womb and a lifetime trying to get back there to its certainty and permanence. Finally on our deathbed we return to the womb. First kiss. Never again a first kiss. First kisses are dead. But it is also a birth. It is the birth of adulthood and love.
I have gone for my last run. I am saving my joint health for more important uses, like hiking the Cascades. My hair is leaving me as well, a few a day relentlessly, selfishly. But it is replaced with a new calm. A new trust. A new womb. It is about getting comfortable with the daily deaths for they provide the daily births until we return to the womb in that final breath. Thankfully, mercifully, every drop of Yin has a tiny, maybe imperceivable speck of Yang.
None of this is meant to imply that all births nor all deaths are equal in any way, not impact, or originality, or clarity. The more we fight the daily deaths the more they scar and scare. I try not to think of things as happing to me or me doing things or that I am any particular way. I have relationships to other things and ideas and I have tendencies and predilections and blind spots and magic. And of course, there is no “me” anyway just the part of this big flickering dream-state communal experience that people tend to call “Ray”. The wave graciously dies so that the water can be reborn.
Three minutes old. Probably 50k file size. Absolutely perfect-ish.
Some moments are bigger than others. They really deserve Capital Letters. Except, everything deserves capitaL letters. everything EVERYTHING.
Practice dying. Practice being born. Practice every day as often as you can. Practice alone or in your Sangha. Only through practice do we become familiar and unafraid. Long division no longer scares me as it did many years ago. Sit and breath and first imagine nothing. Then let the feeling or image of nothing melt away to be replaced by nothing. This is birth.
