To Sherry – the mother of my child

What a brilliant and beautiful gift you have given us and our community. This shining little perfect person, easy to smile, edging up to her first laugh – she was crafted inside of you. The ultimate becoming metaphor was a reality inside of your womb – something from nothing, a gift of love, born. Every other event will be a rebirth – this was a birth – and what a birth it was! How hard you worked to bring her from the world you made for her inside to the place you are continuing to make for her here in our world.

Our little Raine – you are her MOMMY! Can you believe it – you are someone’s MOMMY, MOM, MAMA, MOTHER! And while I know it is your way to question and worry and ruminate over what sort of job you are doing or will do, my love, my sweet and perfection driven wife – you can simply ask anyone who spends a few minutes with her that she is happy and healthy and filled with light. Most of this is your doing. Most of this is you having given her - your light- your blood, your waters, your minerals and vitamins. Added to that is what you have been to her since your bodies detached – milk, love, care, that soft voice, the smiles and laughter, the snuggles, the sleeping side by side, the greeting her when she wakes and you both enter a sacred mommy baby space as you help her greet the world again and again.

Each year that passes will bring more challenges and joy for you and her and us. Every moment is a blessing together. I know that now more than ever. Every moment passes so quickly unless you are in it. She grows and week by week one thing that I love about life with Raine is replaced by something new. As she grows through these moments and we attend her and teach her, if we open our eyes to who she is and what she experiences, we are given yet another gift of your womb. The spiritual and psychological growth that comes with the transformation of parenthood or being in a community with a new life.

In this light I see the true power of the womb – to send forth a new life. That life moving forward in space and time transforms the world around them. Each life its own, but the transformation that life brings has the fingerprints of not only that child, but the parents, family, friends and community. We swirl together making more of one another with each passing goodness, truth or beauty.

There was a moment of rebirth for me in the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica– an awakening to the earth’s womb. A brief glimpse of a piece of understanding that suggests how the natural world, including us and our little Raine, are the impacts of billions of births. We are ripples upon ripples – all connected back to the earliest, most shared births of stars and planets – were we came into being from stardust and light.

You are Raine’s most immediate connection to all that has come before, to the world of people and plants and animals, to the heavens filled with stars. Your hands upon her little body are a reminder of all that has come before. Holding her up to the light for growth and warmth – reminds her of where we have all come from.

I am grateful that you are the mother of my child, that you are Raine’s mother. I am pleased she will learn about life from you, I am blessed to raise her in this world with you, to be your partner in bringing her up right. Seeing the two of you together has already brought me more contented moments than the rest of my life before you gave birth to her.

Downstairs, while you still sleep, your mother is cooking breakfast. Raine is swinging in her swing, listening to sounds of the ocean. There are cycles going on that I feel feeble to express, but I feel them – mothers and their children – life together. I pray that someday I will understand these cycles more, but for now, I feel blessed to be in their glow on Mother’s Day.