Every day I watch our now 10-week old daughter, Olive, learn a new skill. She is just on the cusp of rolling over and has mastered a pretty stealthy cobra pose from tummy time. She talks up a storm with a vocal range that is daily expanding. She is very expressive with her arms and legs and face. She loves nature and stares intently at the sky and trees when we hike. If she is with me when I practice yoga, she loves hearing the sanskrit names of poses. More times than I can count daily I am struck by her pure authentic expression of desire.

Olive is completely uninhibited. She tells us when she is hungry and when she is full. She lets us know if she is tired. She isn't shy to say "Hey! I'm over here! Pay attention." She cries when she feels the pain of separation. She smiles and receives us when we are reunited. She is interested and curious about her own body as she discovers that her limbs belong to her and and an ever evolving volition over her movement. She also expresses pure delight and honest frustration. Discovering her body, voice and emotions is watching the deepest of sadhanas. Olive is so completely pure in her explorations and her efforts are rewarded with clear skill in action. She is a buddha, as all babies are of course, because of her purity of devotion to life. 

As an apprentice to the path of embodiment, I am watching Olive for lessons in how to be in relationship to qualities like Curiosity, Frustration, Genuineness and Love. I am watching her for teachings in learning how to be in these bodies in free and new ways. I am her deepest student. She is teaching me all about being human--deeply human--connecting me to the other species and to the stars.

Occasionally I hear from people that babies, because they are preverbal, are difficult to understand. I have come to fully disagree. You see, in the small family system of baby and caregivers, ideally the caregivers are listening, looking and witnessing so that their own attunement to the baby is symbiotic to the babies needs. I think if you observed myself and Elliot with Olive you would see that the three of us actually speak a language together as a family. Most of it is in gesture and sound. The minutia of micro expression and the implicit feeling behind it. And so I do not find my daughter particularly hard to understand without words. Sometimes of course I am at a loss and stumped on how to meet a need I am unclear about. In these moments I tell her with my words that I am trying to understand her and I am listening and we can work it out. I couple this verbal behavior with a loving, present touch. What we might lack in verbal communication we are continuing with the communication of body to body, breath to breath, gaze to gaze. I usually find that in these moments, though we are decades apart, me as mama and she as baby, we can connect and unite in the sweetest of places. This place, you see is not one of words anyway. It is simply the feeling of, well,

Unconditional Love. 

More and more I want to reside in this place of unconditional love--in this field of contact without words. I am often too tired for the sharing of words these days. I wear my heart outside my body now in the form of this little creature we named Olive. And I of course, have her counting on me to show-up in ways I have never experienced and am growing into every moment of every day. You see, my heart is so full being a mama. For someone who prides herself on being articulate, I cannot even express in words my feelings for my daughter and for being a mother. Its complicated you know. Not only because there is joy and love. Also because there is so much confusion and pain. So many broad and complicated simultaneous emotions come along for the ride of mothering. Just as Olive is figuring out how to be in her body and on earth, I am figuring out how to be in this new body and on earth with a child. Sadly our common culture does not have a language to speak in the field of unconditional love for its mothers. So each of us, mother to mother, child to child, family to family must begin this new language. 

And so my heart is full of all of it. I experience the broadest spectrum of emotion each day just as she does. We are waking up together to our human nature as it unfolds every day. And it is indeed ecstatic. Not easy/ Always amazing. Out of this and part of this is my broken heart for all the motherless daughters and childless mothers. My heart aches for the children who grow up without a sense of unconditional ever-present love. I have said this before to countless students, and I'll share it with you now in the wake of Mothers Day and with Fathers Day approaching:

The wounds you have from your parents are not because of lack of love. Only ever because of lack of skill.

I know this must be true. I love Olive more than I thought I could love anything. But I do not always love the act of mothering. I do not always do the "right" thing. I make missteps daily and have felt tremendous anxiety at my mothering flailing already. Lack of skill you see. Not lack of love.

So I am learning how t best mother our precious Olive. I am learning again how to best mother myself. I am learning how to let my own mother, mother and grandmother. I'd like to think that our sadhanas as adults, whatever they may be, help us rediscover the love our parents have for us and make peace with the places love got lost and crumbled. I hope our sadhanas build skill sets within us so that we can give ourselves and ultimately our progeny the fullest forms of support possible. In a sense giving love both form and wings, which is essentially skill and action. 

I'm sure we all have someone in our lives to whom we could say this gentle blessing and prayer. Maybe it is even to a part of yourself.

I Love You
I See You
I Am Sorry
I Understand. 
I Forgive You. 

I know we have much work to do, practices to attend to, families to foster. I look out unto our world and to you with new eyes now--the eyes of a baby--from the field of Love--looking and longing to embody fully.

Bless this field of our own Becoming,
Livia

Dear You, 

Dear incredible you. On the precipice of your own becoming. A version you have yet to see, yet to know, yet to be. This is Me talking to You. 

I want to remind you that you are already stronger than you think you are. You are woman. Fire. Earth. Blood. Bone. You are the rumbling Herself that brings Life forward into Being. Despite your own shallow attempts to undercut your own sensual perfection and to distract yourself in all ways possible from destiny’s desire on you, you are, 

Here. 

Slowly and also so swiftly,

Arriving. 

Do not fear your own power. Do not fear your own Love. Do not fear your own compassion. Do not fear your own vulnerable swollen heart that never goes back to the size it was before. 

You know the scientists say your heart muscle and your uterus muscle are made from the same kind of tissues. One returns to its original size. One never does. 

You will come to see that a part of you now lives forever outside your own skin. You will come to see more than ever that you are not in control. Don't hold sold tightly to the things you wanted. Let it go. This is better. This is best. Don't hold so tightly to your beliefs. Just hold tightly to your Faith. Let go of the roughness and the harshness. But hold your might and your ferocity close to your heart and in the back of your tongue. You will likely need it. 

Dearest unborn mother, there is no ready. There is no right time. There is no perfect. What is broken is whole already. You know this to be true. What it is longing is longing for you. What is ready is simply the ripeness of seen and unseen forces guiding you, holding you, swaying you forward. 

Forever. 

When you are older than you are today you will see it is all as it should be. When you have more lines on your face that hold the worry and the fear of a person you love that is you, but not you, you will understand your own mother. And her mother. And her mother. 

As your hair turns grey and your eyes deepen and soften, the stars of the Mother’s Constellation will continually reveal themselves to you. There is only so much you could possibly understand now. Lest I blow your mind into a thousand starry bits that you could never follow. For now, know this: 

You already have what you need. There is no right thing or right way. And your way is unfolding before your eyes, each day, each breath, each kiss, each daily ritual of living. Your way is Good. Holy and True. 

Go ahead. Banish the doubt now because it won’t help you anyway. While you’re at it, banish all the assumptions you have. They won’t be of much use any longer. Oh, and another thing dear mother in her own caul, don't let anyone tell you who to pray to. Don't let anyone tell you who to bow to. Bow to your self. To your unborn self. Bow forever to the seed. Pray always to the dark-red, golden place inside. There is nothing outside you that is better, fuller or more powerful. It is already there. It is not the kind of listening you might be used to using. It is not the kind of feelings you might be used to feelings. 

Risk everything. 

To the mother on the precipice, the brink, go ahead now, descend. 

Fall. 

Surrender. 

Fill and let go. 

You have done enough excavating, enough healing, enough work for now. Good work my darling lady. You have done the best you could. And that, you will come to find, is purely good enough. 

Know that there is immense freedom in being bound to your beloveds. Tether yourself now to a world that is always unraveling. 

Stay. 

Be here. 

There is no other way now. Bind your hands and your heart and your breast to Love and to the earthly human place that is merely a moment of your Time. 

You and I will meet again some day. A long time from now. You will be glad I wrote this to you. You will thank me and come to your knees. I’m you a thousand lifetimes away. Still the seed. Still the raging red golden part of you. Deeply alive. Deeply connected. Deeply reverent to the ever holiness Herself. And in that meeting you will see I am simply your own children speaking to you from inside yourself. 

Waiting for you to be born too. 

I walked the mud-drenched trail around the frozen lake that madly sunny, winter-warm afternoon. That’s the beautiful part of living in the Front Range of Colorado’s rocky mountains. It gets frigid and snows. Two days later, its melting and you hike in a t-shirt once again. So I walked in the warm sun. And at this point walking looks more like waddling. And a consistently ever slowing waddle at that.

Ankles bare and getting slightly muddied, my mind made winding traces and tracks back to the memory of the last time I saw my grandmother with my own eyes. 

It was June 2013, in the late afternoon, just after my bridal shower. She was too frail then to come out for the party and I knew she would not come to our wedding across the country here in Colorado. So I went to visit her clad in my white bohemian bridal outfit so she could see it and feel part of the festivities. My grandmother never liked it when I dressed “shlumpy” as she called it. 

She was drifting in and out of sleep when Elliot and I arrived. It took all her effort to sit up and sit straight in between us on the bed. I was dressed in that white dress my mother bought me for the occasion. Too which she said was just right as a beautiful bride. 

I was dressed in that white dress but my grandmother was the angel that day. You see, she bore with her own eyes more than any human being should ever have to endure. She hid for her life, birthed three sons (and one in a camp mind you), crossed and ocean with diamonds sown and smuggled in her skirt, buried her husband as well as a son and watched four granddaughters fly on with their lives. And nothing brought her more joy than the happiness of her granddaughters. 

That day I sat next to her she held my hand tightly and she held Elliot's tightly too. She drank us in with what remained of her sight. She knew that we were already legally married as we had told her some months before of our quiet ways—of which she seemed to approve. If she didn't I would never know. She was good about that. She kept things to herself if she didn't think her disapproval would help you or make a difference. 

By the time we sat with her on this hot June day, she had been rather frail and failing for some time and the sense I always got from trips past was that she just wasn't ready yet to let go. She didn't feel at peace to leave her body just yet and ninety-some years old. So she held on. And I have never seen anyone cling to the exquisitely poignant and painfully beautiful manifest world the way she did for those long few years. 

But on this day something about her was entirely different. She was so happy, so at peace. She held our hands tightly. She kissed us. She cried. And she told us she was okay now. She told us she knew everything was good now because I had someone to love and take care me. Elliot smiled and cried. She told us she was very proud of us. And that she was at peace knowing I was happy. I knew in that moment this would be the lat time I would see her. So I just smiled and twinkled my eyes at her in that white bohemian dress she told me I looked like a true bride in. I didn't want her to see how sad I was. We both knew were saying goodbye. 

None of this could have been very long in real time. She got tired rather quickley. And just like that she rather ushered us out the moment she got weary. She was done. And that was it. 

We went home. 

I wept. 

Four month later we had our wedding. 

A week later she left her body. 

Anyone on the trail that day who saw me must have thought I was in the middle of some crisis as the tears rolled like a mud slide down my cheeks. The way they are streaming now as I put these words to page. But something about the slow walk around the frozen lake that day—something about being 8 months pregnant— and something about that golden sun—made me think of her. 

Beauty often makes me not sad but melancholy. It is in these moments I feel all life as an ocean inside. I feel the joy and the deep sadness. I feel the gratitude and the longing. I feel the happiness and the deep well of sadness. I feel the fullness of being so human—so imprinted in a body—so marked by lineage and life. 

Perhaps the most painful part of being pregnant and bringing my child into the world, is that I do it without any of my own grandparents. For me, the saddest part about living in the world at this very moment is living in a world where my grandmother does not. This child whose time is coming rapidly now, would bring my grandmother the joy she truly always deserved to see in the world. My grandmother always placed her faith in the hope of the future. So she could leave once she knew I would carry on the torch. 

In this moment I laughed to myself, rounding the corner of the trail, as I realized something that perhaps we might call a bit TMI or (too much information) to share with you. But I will. That dress—that white dress I wore to the shower and that she loved—according to my calculations—I wore to a wedding the day I conceived my child. 

Funny how the universe plays these little cosmic jokes on us. Funny how she keeps on winking and batting her big bright eyes and long eyelashes. In love. In light. In death and loss. In birth and life. In it all she is with us. She is weaving all the parts of our lives into a bigger tapestry we could ever imagine.