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.
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.
