now everything is born now everything unfolds and time itself is such a mystery

some birthpoem-notes for lenore's 3rd baby before it is born a la the poem assignment she gave me! (re: comment section in idea! post)


:::::::::::here at the birth-window::::::::::::::::


window to the other world but it is made of our bodies;
you can’t see through it
but you can see it—

jon kabat-zinn says something like, there is no place you can stop the sky and say that, that, that right there—is the sky

there is no place you can stop birth and say that is birth. here comes the head, here are the shoulders, the belly. . .

which of those is birth?

is it after everything is born? is right now birth? what if i feel a contraction two years before i am every pregnant? or what if i dream of my baby's name before i even have my period?

when can we say we are born, when can we say that was birth, when can we say now everything is born?

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there are a lot of questions circling around birth and its energies, physically and soulfully. also there are questions about now. because i like it, i am going to type out some large sections from jon kabat-zinn's book "coming to our senses"; these particular passsages are on what he calls the "nowscape":

“Everything that unfolds unfolds now, and so might be said to unfold in the nowscape. We’ve already observed how nature unfolds only and always in the now. The trees are growing now. The birds are flying through the air or sitting in the branches only now. The rivers and the mountains are in the now. The ocean is in the now. The planet itself is turning now. One physicist, writing about Einstien and time, observed that change in something is the way we measure time, and anything that changes in a regular way can therefore be called a clock. In fact, it is more accurate to be saying that change is the way we measure time than to say that time is the way we measure change, since time is in and of itself such a mystery. Everything changes, and so there is time. Everything changes, and so we experience time. Everything changes, and so we can experience change by stepping outside of time for a moment, and becoming intimate with what is, beyond the abstraction that is the mystery of time.” (235)

“There is no time other than now. We are not, contrary to what we think, “going” anywhere. It will never be more rich in some other moment than in this one. Although we may imagine that some future moment will be more pleasant, or less, than this one, we can’t really know. But whatever the future brings it will not be what you expect, or what you think, and when it comes, it will be now too. . . We can spin off into the future, rail about the past, think that things will be OK someday provided this happens and that doesn’t happen, all of which may be true to one degree or another, but it still has you missing your life and, in a sense, all life.” (236)

“For now is already the future and it is already here. Now is the future of the previous moment just past, and the future of all those moments that were before that one. Remember back in your own life for a moment, to when you were a child, or an adolescent, or a young adult, or to any other period already gone. This is that future. The you you were hoping to become, it is you. Right here. Right now. You are it. Don’t like it? Who doesn’t like it? Who is even thinking that? And who wants “you” to be better, to have turned out some other way? Is that you you too? Wake up! This is it. You have already turned out." (240)