Thinking about tomorrow

It's looking like tomorrow will be the day; we head to the hospital at 8am unless there are other happenings tonight.

After our trip to Muir woods, I've spent the weekend preparing -- cleaning out the garage, setting up TV/DVD/Cable in the bedroom, putting up a small Christmas tree, setting up shelves in the "basement" which turned out to be far less damp than our garage. Overall, a lot of reorganizing and schlepping. Ilsa's father was (and is) tremendously helpful with all of this.

I've been thinking a lot about birth and the change that's about to hit us. Everyone suggests it will be like a ton of bricks. I am reminded of the introduction to an e. e. cummings book (full text here). It's a bit snobby and full of that sophomoric "we are special because we notice and feel and are full of passion" -- and, yet, there are parts that just nail some of how I feel about what is to come. Of course, it's about the "generalized" births that we go through again and again in our lives.

...We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:the mystery which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now;and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.

...

Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles:they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn,a human being;somebody who said to those near him,when his fingers would not hold a brush "tie it into my hand"--.

nothing proving sick or partial. Nothing false,nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal. Nothing ordinary or extraordinary,nothing emptied or filled,real or unreal,nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. Everywhere tints childrening,innocent spontaneous,true. Nowhere possibly what flesh and impossibly such a garden,but actually flowers which breasts are among the very mouths of light. Nothing believed or doubted;brain over heart,surface:nowhere hating or to fear;shallow,mind without soul. only how measureless cool flames of making;only each other building always distinct selves of mutual entirely opening;only alive. Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno,impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong;never to gain or pause,never the soft adventure of undoom,greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence;never to rest and never to have:only to grow.

Words do not express it (and the poem above acknowledges, it seems to me, that truth) and yet I feel compelled to try to state now, before this change, that I hunger for it. I do not know what tomorrow will bring in detail or particulars (and I know that those particulars are the beauty, the art, and the magic of it all); I do know that I love my wife, that I mostly cannot believe my luck in being with her, that I can't wait to meet our child, and most of all, that I hope with my whole heart for a healthy mom and a healthy baby.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question

Amoureux Toujours

=D