REBIRTH

Birth and death trade names a thousand times a day.

Birth—the most profound act and experience of our lives. It is the genesis of our days, our nights, and our passage through those dark, familiar waters, where we first became form under the supreme guidance of our mother’s heartbeat. Our entire being crafted in coordination with the rhythmic pounding of life, calling us out of the ether, gathering us into ourselves, held suspended in perfect oceanic darkness.

Perhaps our truest home while on this earth—except in the fleeting moments we chase across our days and nights, always reaching for home.

And then…

DEATH

Our first real loss. Paramount. Perhaps so traumatic it explains why we cannot remember the first year or so of our lives. Maybe this forgetting is by design. It is time to emerge, to be pushed from our home into the absolute unknown. Wailing—the first declaration of our lives, screaming, “I am here. I am alive.”

Harsh light. Harsh sound. Harsh touch against the softest skin that has only ever floated, suspended in watery nothingness. I could go on about the ineffable phenomena of our existence and the softly infinite, curious mechanics that bring us into it.

This is birth.
This is death.

The beginning of our strange odyssey—pushed forth from our motherland into foreign worlds and journeys of love and loss. To love is to lose. To touch, to hold—what we love can be taken, will be taken.

I believe what we characterize as rebirth is, in actuality, a small death: an emergence from darkness into the unknown, a loss of place, person, or self. The dead husk shucked from the corn, revealing tender, sweet fruit. The snake crawling from its own skin. Living—and applying these lessons from the natural world—is the only way I have been able to make sense of death and birth, which have revealed themselves to me as the same process.

It is easier to look back toward the shores of our birth, toward being born anew, to relive life again, than to prostrate ourselves firmly forward—toward life, toward death—which, if I have gathered anything at all, lies in wait as another birth.

I often remember a parable, though I don’t know its origin: “When death finds you, be sure that you are alive.” That your life itself is self-evident—a life well lived. I believe this is only possible through as many small deaths as we can manage to walk, swim, run, sit, stand, dream, listen through. Endure. To be made tender and ripe against the hardness of our days and nights, as hard as they will be. To constantly seek to be made anew—lest we walk this earth already dead, which to me may be the greatest sin of all: to deny life and our part in it, to turn our backs on miracle, on light.

Today, it is a labyrinth—so many broken mirrors, black screens, disembodied voices relentlessly seeking us, and us seeking them, hoping to be informed of who we are and who we are not. Always lost in this reflection.

All I can say of rebirth is this: die with grace as many times as you can on this earth, so that you may be

REBORN