It's important to be warm

Over the past year+ in yoga class, we’ve discussed how if humans were born with the same capacities as many critters, we’d be born as 9 month olds. My skyrocketing enjoyment of Benjamin this past month only proves that. I have fewer pictures than usual as I’m too busy holding his hands, rolling his ball to him, tickling his ribs both literally and figuratively. He is no longer alien, but in fact is a tiny human. A laughing, squirming, crawling-nearly-walking, babbling, hilarious little person. And healthy. Developing beautifully. Constantly reminding me of the blessing that is his easy existence.

Watching my baby’s mind expand, experiencing life with him, is without par the finest experience I know. I made an obvious move to me, causing a sudden unpleasant noise to him, and he shrieked in terror. I startle easily, too—and only have my longer life experience to compare what is with what isn’t actually scary. I peek around the corner of the room he is in and he laughs and flaps his arms wildly at the magic that is seeing. He knows I’m not disappearing just as much as he knows that if I’ve taken the (apparently very chewy) power cord up and out of sight, that if he pulls onto the table, he can get to it again. Being! it is so wonderful!

How we think, how we develop language, even what we see, is of constant fascination and has been for a long time. No matter all our advancements, the agencies of the brain are only vaguely understood. With the old plague of depression, as well as all the ADD and ADHD that seemed to circle much of my life (and so many friends diagnosed or casually assumed to be affected), and now the wave of autism, it’s hard to turn around without a part of the puzzle coming under scrutiny.

If there is one thing that technology (simple digital equipment) plus the internet (delivery method) is good at, it is showing you worlds you may never experience for yourself, and may not have the time/energy/ability to seek out and understand. Books have always been a way to fall into the world of someone, somewhere else, but there are aspects of life that can’t or shouldn’t be explained inside words. Culturally, we rely on words, often too much, often to our detriment as for some people, it offers a way not to have to feel, not to understand with one’s whole being. Anyone who dances, or loves to watch dance, can comprehend that. It’s more than kinesthetic. Music notation is only a pale version of hearing music. It’s all translation. Definitions can only fail.

Awhile back I read The Curious Incident of the Dog at Midnight, then in the past few months, the amazing and, if I dare say, life-changing book Animals in Translation, and yesterday on one of my list-servs, I get this video. Watch through the second half when the content is explained; patience is rewarded, even to the point of becoming stunning.

There is so much to being alive and so many ways to be.

Filed by joy at 3:05 pm under baby, life
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These are the best icicles I’ve seen in ages. It’s been an impressive storm, though we are getting stir crazy over here.

Filed by joy at 6:39 pm under visuals
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I am taking in the simple pleasures. Coffee, a napping child, time to write and think a bit, inability to do my pre-planned tasks, listening to the same song all day. I celebrate day care calling in Snow Day with a matching cancellation of both tonight’s meetings and tomorrow morning’s. I had to cancel my haircut, and my hairdresser was very understanding and attempted to share with me her disgust at the inconvenience of weather. I made nice, but I just couldn’t echo true annoyance. I am in deep reflection mode. A deep, quiet snow is welcome in such cases.

This has been a hard year, though not for me. Sure we have been passing around the creeping crud illness, full of aches and sinuses and bone exhaustion, but it is nothing. Benjamin flipped a toy over onto his face and gave himself a wicked bleeding nose yesterday, but it is nothing. He proved his bodily aversion to sweet potatoes by tossing them back to us all over his crib, soaking three layers down to the mattress itself. It is nothing. I’m safely in the eye of a wide, mean storm. True we are not the pictures of health; Saggar is on antibiotics again, and while that is something, it is not as horrid as it could be.

This year has already brought funerals for three women in my extended circle: two mothers of friends and my own mother’s best friend, suddenly. A week ago today, her friend had a stroke. She died last Friday. My mom is handling it of course, but is understandably shell-shocked. My friends who have been burying their mothers I cannot even speak about; it’s simply not fathomable. We’re not old enough for this. Not yet. Not ever, really, but still.

I’ve been visiting my client/friend in hospital after her stroke and she is doing better than most, which is to say she is actually able to form a few words, a far cry from any shade of normal. My mother’s co-worker is off-and-on able to go home as he recovers from his heart incident. My uncle is in a nursing home now, permanently. These are the happier stories? I heard a clip of radio story the other day that said something along the lines of An adventure is a journey that doesn’t become a tragedy.

In all this, my mom reminds both herself and me that her mother always told her there is no reason to postpone doing things, from using the “good china” to planning my parents’ trip to New Zealand with us this December. Why wait for anything when you could be struck down (by a stroke, by a bus, who knows) tomorrow? So I’m home, happily, safe from the storm. I sing to Benjamin, There’s a blessing on the ground.

Filed by joy at 12:09 pm under life
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