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