Two Hands

As of today, I can do the following things one-handed, with my non-dominant hand: change the laundry from the washer to the dryer, spread butter on toast, and type a short email to someone I know will not judge my bad spelling and telegraph-like sentences.

Nursing. An epic battle. I am shocked our species has survived. If we were cave people without support from cave-lactation consultants, my child and I would be fossils. It is the hardest things I have ever done in my life - and I have spent 3 days alone in the woods with a teenager with severe autism. Now that we are good at it, I am tempted to check email, read a book, do any number of activities while my very beautiful daughter is eating for what feels like eternity when I'm only staring at the walls.

So... presented with the challenge of boredom, I came back to: The Present Moment. And found that time flies when you're staring at something so fresh from God. I can practically see neural pathways forming while she eats and moves her tiny hands around, learning what "smooth" and "rough" and "cotton" and "skin" and "wet" mean. How brilliant that she knows her own little body so well, to pull away when she is full and cry when she is hungry. How miraculous that I keep making enough food for her insatiable appetite. Years of evolution, all for this moment, when the early early light begins to creep up on our corner of the bedroom, her tiny hands constantly in motion, like a snake's tongue, feeling the air, the skin, the milk, the air, the air, the air.

I remember a passage from _A New Earth_ in which Eckart Tolle suggests that "motherese" is a little condescending to babies because it implies they know less than us and need special speak to understand the world around them. I feel that my child is so wise, so much wiser than I am, so knowing and perceptive and intuitive. "Life is the dancer, and we are the dance"... she is the dance as Life flows through her, and someday onto the next form... she is therefore older than dirt, and so am I... but I can't help but to goo goo ga ga over her because well... the form Life took this time around is a baby!

The cliche of "the greatest joy"... when I say it, or think it, it is suddenly round, juicy, pregnant with truth... greatest.... joy. Joy of all the choirs of angels and all the sunlight you've ever seen filtering through leaves in fall and all the warmth of a day you bathe in sun like honey dripping into your tea.. joy that presses hard against the inside wall of your chest in those rare moments when you viscerally know what a miracle this common act of living is.