Fatherwork - August 4

How can we make space for spirituality in our daughter’s life?

Her birth was the most miraculous moment I have ever lived. Her passage from the womb to join us in the breathing world birthed a world. The moment was a world unto itself, and it began the field of experience which is all the relations that make up her life. It was a sacred transformation of the world bringing something new, and so making the world new. 

And now life has returned to routine-in-transition. Magic must be found in the everyday. As we instill in our daily lives with certain ways of being, our daughter also comes into rhythm with the world, with us. The patterns and traditions we embody become her world, how she knows how to be in the world. And the reverse is also true: she makes our world anew with each breath and gesture.

Countless patterns have been set already, yet our family traditions are still very few. Small rituals abound, and we cultivate these carefully: in thanking the sun and earth, in enjoying food together, in daily prayers. Yet larger celebrations—community and seasonal rituals—these have been very few since she was born. The cultures that we share with our families and community have many, many celebrations and accompanying beliefs, we celebrate with so many, and our own ancestral inheritance is vast and varied. So very varied that it becomes a question: what traditions are ours to pass on?

We cultivate and join traditions that foster care, gratitude, calm, resilience, balance, love. I hope all our holidays (holy days), all family and community rituals, and all spiritual attunement nurtures these values and the natural cycles of life.

That much we have clear. And still, exactly what spiritual traditions are we passing on? We are not Christian, like our parents, nor do we belong to any other church or religious institution. And so we have no prescribed set of spiritual traditions to give our daughter… and yet we hope to live into rich and rooted traditions together.

To know how this might best happen, I want to articulate my personal beliefs:

I believe that all existence is imbued with divine spirit—reality is divinity.
I believe the Earth and Cosmos are alive, existence breathing itself into being.
I believe we should strive for balance following the flow of life amid the world’s shifting currents of chaos and order, creation and destruction, life and death.
I believe the world is yin and yang, with each holding the seed of the other, and that change is the only constant.
I believe that the divine is both good and evil, and I serve the greatest good, which many people name God. 

This is not merely mystical—this is everyday life lived as sacred while still recognizing and accepting it as it is with its terrible imperfection, practicing consciousness in everyday life, breathing into and out of each step with integrity while respecting all our relations.

These are beliefs I have inherited from many communities in my life. Animism—the idea that spirit is everywhere—is one way of naming these beliefs. Truly, this is the tradition of my ancestors, and yours: for the vast majority of our existence on this planet, simply looking beyond the past few hundred years, our ancestors all understood, on every corner of the globe, that we are one spirit among many, one point of consciousness connected to all other points of consciousness, navigating the varied and unpredictable flows of energy and power, with all the spirits inhabiting plants, animals, objects, places. It’s all alive: some of it eats us, some of it feeds us, and some of it we eat or feed. All is mysterious and powerful and to be respected.

We pray, and so articulate our own ajayus—our spirits—with words and song, sending and seeking blessings for our family, community and world. We pray when sharing food at meals, when beginning big journeys, when greeting the day or the plant relatives, praising the cycles of the moon and sun and time.

And here on the ground of the mundane, we navigate the landscape we are born into. We wash dishes and sweep the floor, we write and work and play. We share, both the bounty and the struggle. We move in the movements for justice and peace, and try to lend our weight to rebalancing our world, whether that’s through the stands we take, the circles we walk in, or the way we sit on the bus. We try to keep out of the way of the political, social, natural disasters.

I hope to teach my daughter and the next generation how to navigate the capricious eddies of chaos lacing the order in our world. I’ve now lived long enough to see where many of these current currents are flowing from, and to have some idea of how to avoid or redirect some dangers. And yet truly, as we walk on a knife’s edge above the roiling currents of global convulsion, the chaos feels greater than the order at times, and our footing is shaky at best…

And it seems this has always been the case: humanity has always been on the edge of annihilation. The scale is greater than ever, and this also has always been the case. It seems this has always been part of navigating the yin-yang of the universe—the transformation of energy, each energy always containing the seeds of its opposite. Creation leads to destruction which leads to the seeds of new life. We are co-creators and co-destroyers of this world. I am dedicated to cultivating life and goodness, and to do so means keeping calm, humor, play, joy, and above all love, in the midst of the madness.

I don’t feel it’s necessary to teach our daughter any of this—it is evident. Infants naturally sense they are in an alive, scary, wonderful world, and they naturally take it one breath at a time with complete presence. It doesn’t seem to be necessary to teach my daughter that the world is divine… perhaps I simply need to not teach her otherwise. Perhaps I simply need to fully learn it from her. As she grows, and I grow with her, she will grow into a world we co-create together, into the spirit that we weave as a family into the spirit of this time.

Fatherwork - July 17

These are soft days. Tender days. Days of aching arms and backs and hearts. Aching days followed by restless nights.

Today is the full moon, partially eclipsed, and our daughter has not been sleeping well. I write this now at 3:30am, awake after having fallen asleep with her at 8pm. The last few days have been very rough. She started crawling last week, has been amped all day and night ever since. She probably is aching at night as well: I can see all that baby fat turning to muscle, and her falls are surely bruising.

For some reason this sleepless stretch has coincided with both of us fasting for 2 weeks from sugar, alcohol and coffee. Without our crutches, we find ourselves hobbling about.

I had always been struck by the term that parents use, saying I’m going to put the baby down, which always sounded a bit mobster to me—why wouldn’t you simply say I’m going to put the baby to sleep? Now I understand: it is often a long, elaborate and delicate dance to physically put a baby down, since all they want is to be held, and they cry the moment they are put down, unless you observe a strict adherence to the putting down ritual. It seems our baby doesn’t want to go to sleep at all some days, seemingly grieving the end of each day. It often feels like we have to trick her into slipping into the dreamworld, essentially hypnotizing her with song, rocking, bouncing and shushing.

Capitalism clearly is to blame for our sleep problems! Seriously: we both work full time jobs (and must if we want to remain living in this beautiful area and beloved community), and so need to conform our baby’s sleep schedule to the workday. And gone are the countless millennia in which humans lived with many children and multiple generations, when babies would sleep in a room with multiple children or grandparents, and so be soothed by their presence if not their arms.

We have been questioning our methods lately. The modern answer to our problem: sleep training (or teaching, or whatever you want to call it). We are considering this, though still not convinced. We tried gentle “no-cry” methods of encouraging her to sleep on her own in earlier months, and no dice. It’s a controversial topic, and though I have reviewed the research and don’t think it’s inhumane as many do, I am also not sure if it will be any easier than our current situation. We share a bed (safely), and with this method have generally been sleeping quite well, with feedings happening side-lying and so barely waking anyone. We are quite reluctant to risk endangering this sweet set-up. Plus, we know sleep training is not a one-and-done deal, it must be re-done whenever a developmental milestone occurs, or you travel, or…

Tonight I am trying what almost all our ancestors did: I fell sleep with baby (oh bliss!), then woke up at the middle-of-the-night feeding/changing, and am now spending some time in quiet activity. Soon I will be off for my second sleep, which will last till dawn—fingers crossed.

Fatherwork - July 12

This afternoon my wife and I were driving home and strategizing about how to get our baby to sleep tonight. I was talking through a half-dozen steps—from changing to rocking to feeding to lying down and easing/oozing away from her once she’s deep enough asleep—and she said, this is mothering: planning out the details of how exactly to care for a child. I was struck by this thought, and wondered silently why this would not be fathering. She continued, answering my unspoken question: it is generally considered mother work to put the baby to sleep. “To mother” in English is to nurture, to care-take, to raise, to love; “to father” is merely to inseminate. I feel a flash of pride at the idea that I have spent some time mothering (I have always felt sadness that I will never be able to become pregnant and give birth). At the same time, I feel a vital urgency to redefine what it is to father, to broaden that definition to include nurturing, loving, serving through all the minutiae of caring for a child.

This evening I hopped on my bike and cruised through the town for the first time in a while. My god, how exhilarating! I sure can move—especially when all I am moving is myself. What a capable individual I am! I have moved my body all around the world. And yet, I am less impressed by my recent world travel than I am by my baby beginning to hoist herself from sitting to standing. And really, what’s the value of being capable, of having strength, if it is only to move oneself? I am learning to redefine strength, beyond what I have absorbed from our culture’s individualistic ego-based masculinity. And I revel in these moments, grateful for the power and freedom of traveling solo.

Fatherwork - June 18

At times I feel guilty for just living, for simply eating and sleeping and doing the basics to live. I feel like I should be doing more, having more impact on the world. I am not sure if this is guilt inherited from a capitalist system that wants me to be always producing. Or perhaps this guilt is inherited from a Catholic vision of the world where I feel like I need to work off the shame of original sin or all the other sins that generations of my ancestors have heaped on top of that. Or an activist guilt: fear that the world is in desperate need of something that I might have to offer and need to be working to give. It is probably a wicked cocktail of all of these.

And I recognize the inherent value of simply living, of caring for myself and my family. Truly, all other activities of value, from philosophy to politics to art to food, should aim at making conditions possible for people to live well, to care for self, family and community in peace. If we cannot live well in the everyday lifeways that make up our daily rhythms, all other activities are worthless.

I sometimes imagine another person, someone in a far more difficult situation, imagining me, and demanding that I enjoy every last drop of my privilege, that I forge excellence from all the good material I have been given. I feel like I owe this to these imaginary strangers, to all those who came before me and to all those who currently are out there now dying for the opportunities that I have. Perhaps I am connecting with myself in the future remembering back to my self now in this blessed time… or perhaps I am sensing future generations invoking me as ancestor. How can I show up for them, now?

Sometimes the best thing to do is very little. Wouldn’t our world be better if people weren’t always running around trying to do so many things? All the do-goodery has really screwed us over the centuries—too many damn crusades.

My dear wife reminded me today: rest, fallow time, space, all the emptinesses and silences are of vital importance. So many haven’t had that luxury. Nor have I, except rarely. It is so good to have space in between the movement and action, yin to balance the yang. I have done many things in my life, and it is time to do less, better. Time to simply nurture my child. This is enough.

Fatherwork - June 16 - Father’s Day

We gather in a circle, sharing food and blessings.

My daughter is held by generations gathered around, expressing feelings: hope, grief, love.

Fatherwork - June 7

Questions I have been asking myself:

Can I clean up a meal, wash dishes, and sweep in maximum stillness and quiet, with the minimum amount of effort, as if all this were a Japanese tea ceremony, with virtually no sound, with every object and body part set into motion with utmost care? And can I do this without scrunching my eyes and clenching my ass in useless effort?

Can I set this sleeping infant down, moving imperceptibly slow, without my heart rate going up, without a sound? And should I start a baby qi gong self-help business?

How can I decolonize, depatriarchalize, detraumatize myself and my parenting to allow my child to remain as free as she was born? And maybe I could just be okay with her eating, sleeping, and pooping well without me trying to liberate the bejeezus out of her?

How can I strive for excellence without taking myself too seriously?

Fatherwork - June 4

Becoming a father changed time for me.

Watching my mother rock and sing to my newborn, to her granddaughter, I remember being an infant, I am brought back to being in her arms. I can also see my daughter’s grandmother become young again herself, perhaps also entering into her memory of being in her own mother’s arms.

The future has also become much more real. My hundred-year-present was my lifetime and the lifetimes of my parents and grandparents, and it had begun to stretch forward with my nieces and nephews. This present has now united fully with the lifetime of my daughter, and I am now deeply connected to all that she will touch. My actions and dwelling in this present will cultivate the world she will live in.

My time alive feels briefer than ever, as I have become increasingly aware of how quickly we grow, and grow old. And yet I now feel myself weaving a new generation of life into being, part of the dance of generations and regeneration, and so my life energy is becoming continuous with coming generations. I can stay here in this present, in this place, and channel to my daughter all my many journeys and relations, all that my ancestors lived and passed to me; it is a feeling of vast, dynamic stillness.

In some ways as parents we have lost all the “free time” we had before we had a child. It’s difficult to find time for our basic necessities while caring constantly for the basic necessities the baby. The tiredness is intense… though not like the first newborn days—those first moments stretched into hours making days full of wonder and love and only minutes of sleep. Time held still. Now, though, it feels like we have gained so much time—as a family, we take walks, and sing, and spend most of our time in the simple actions of domestic life. We eat, sleep, poop, bathe, cry, laugh, play. Time expands.

In those middle-of-the-night wakings, when I hold my baby in her moment of need, I awaken out of normal time into interstitial time: normal time is suspended, and my child becomes the universe.

Fatherwork - May 14

I now spend hours using only one hand, juggling the baby while I cook, clean, shop, text, write. It has become a design and organizational challenge to make the entire home one-handed accessible. Mad respect to all the one-handed (and no-handed) folks out there. And to all those working single moms and dads who do all this with a bone-deep tired that must be way beyond mine—wow.

Late at night, I have the opportunity to move as a sightless person, in near-total darkness, striving for an economy of movement to avoid the devastating error of sound waking baby. It is an elaborate house-wide Japanese tea ceremony: no clinking, all presence, full savoring of all the simple movements and flavors of now. I’ve set up the bedroom for these moments: my clothes just so, to locate and put on blindly. This all feels like good practice, regardless of fatherhood: take care of our space, our objects, and give each thing it’s easily accessed honored space. It’s stewarding a place that is conducive to care, whether that care is for a baby or just simple care for this environment and ourselves.

Care itself has taken on new dimensions: to hold my baby at night, to carry the most valuable thing in my world through the darkness, demands absolute presence of mind and body.

Fatherwork - May 8

Caring for this tiny being, for the weakest and most vulnerable human I have ever known this well, I am finally learning to be strong—which is to be vulnerable, and to know the intense power of vulnerability. This tiny teacher is reminding me, and powerfully compelling me, to slow down, to take walks, to sing. She shows me what it means to live in the present, without worry of the future or past. A master of energy, she is the epicenter of all attention of those in her presence. She leaves me little energy to spend on my habitual narrowings of consciousness that are my anxieties about what is beyond my reach in the past or future. And so I am with her, and with the simple things that she needs, and that I and my wife need when I am not directly caring for her.

She is teaching me to express pain and discomfort with every fiber of the body. So often she expresses what I feel but repress without thinking—so often I remain quiet and unfeeling in the face of terrible things. Even the banal difficult things—hunger, tiredness, traffic—trigger an astoundingly great distress expressed in bold, demanding volume. And yet she feels no fear of the many apocalypses we have learned to fear, she hasn’t heard that climate chaos may turn our living Earth into boiling Venus, never heard the voices of any genocidal dictator or demagogue. I am tempted to think she feels no grief and knows no death, either, but perhaps she does; upon being born into this air-breathing world, she died forever to her former self of the watery womb world. Martín Prechtel writes, in the exquisite The Smell of Rain on Dust: “Our very lives start out from the very beginning by us crying out as hard as we can in a newly found voice, not in a complaining squeal of rage for not having things stay the same, but in a sorrowful musical wail, tiny and beautiful, that says, ‘Mama, where are you? Where am I? I'm cold and alone here without your drumming heart.’ It's the first grief poem, a song.”

I recently lost my friend-brother-teacher-mentor Iván Nogales—he died unexpectedly, his bright light going out suddenly, leaving me, together with his family, friends, community, all his people, suddenly in the dark, blinking in shock by the sudden lack of his creative, passionate and loving brilliance. He met my daughter in the womb, blessed her with the vibrations of his hearty, rolling laughter. His death, in Bolivia, came in the same season as her birth here in California, and he sent his blessings for her just before leaving for the other side. I grieve that she will never meet him and breathe the same air, never learn directly from his clowning wisdom.

And I grieve all the deaths that have deprived and will bereave her: the deaths of good friends, the extinction of countless species, the desecration and destruction of places of power and beauty. I once stood on firm, dry earth at the foot of a glacier in the Bolivian Andes, and heard my guide recall, voice laden with loss, the ice caves that once covered the place we stood, once stretched for one hundred of meters below us, over the now-bare earth. I was stunned then. And now, still sensitive to the miracle of life with my child newly formed, I feel loss as unbearably real… I feel more. I am not stunned; instead, I cry actively. Now, I can feel Iván’s spirit, his ajayu alive and present in me and in all those he touched, in the same way those glacial ice caves continue to echo in the memory and presence of those who knew them. I will pass these spirits on to my daughter, and recognize that all these temporary bodies are only vessels for eternal spirit.

Fatherwork - May 1

I begin three months of paternity leave today, the day variously celebrated as the beginning of summer, the end of spring, May Day, Beltane. I now look back, astounded, on four months of life with my daughter, this tiny teacher who has changed me beyond measure. Impossible to imagine life without her now. And more possible than it has been for years to remember what it was to be in her place: tiny, defenseless, with the enormous power of innocence, full of wonder and fear and pain and love and pure living potential. Sometimes I even feel like I am holding myself when I hold her.

May Day: We celebrate labor by not working, we celebrate workers and thank those who organized and fought and bled to make work humane. I can think of no working practice more humane than taking time off “productive” work in order to care for an infant. I bow in gratitude to those who have made it possible for me to take three months to dedicate myself exclusively to being a father, to nurturing my daughter. I bow in humility for all the mothers in the world, who routinely sacrifice so much to raise their children. I bow in astonishment at the fathers who manage to work without pause (with good reason and without) in the pursuit of creating safety and security for their families. I marvel at my privilege and grieve at how extremely and tragically rare this is for fathers throughout history. What effect will this have on our daughter, to grow with this deep and focused nourishing? What effect will paternity leave becoming more common (may it continue to be so!) have on the generation being born into the world now? How will this change men of this generation, as we learn to caretake in ways that have always been expected of women?

Beltane: the old Celtic traditional celebration of spring turning to summer, revived in the traditions of neopagan America. A season of my life has ended, and a new one begun. Bonfires bless the animals, people leap over flames. Hearths are rekindled from these fires born from pure flint and friction. And so now I am rekindling my dedication to life, I am remade from this new spark which already has consumed my past self. Flowers adorn people, cattle, trees: everyone is in bloom, all is fertile. Maypoles sprout up, girls dancing ribbons around them, celebrating fertility and the union and balance of the male and female. As a father, I feel the responsibility to act with balanced male energy, to teach my daughter mature masculinity, so that she might recognize and embody that energy. And as always, I must balance the male and female energies in myself and in the world—yin and yang, chachawarmi. In achieving balance, however imperfectly, I open the door for my daughter to strive for the same in herself.

The ever-birthing present
gifts and challenges,
swiftly shifts-slips-henges,
rearranges the fences,
centers past and future tenses,
cycling the distances of differences,
impermanences,
life and death dances