As though you were on a wide, gently rocking sea, and the mist that formed from that cool and incoherent night had been touched – who knows where? – by the morning sun. Gray became golden, chill became warm, and shapes materialized out of the glow. “Ah, it’s the lighthouse!” “Then this must be the point…” Near the shore the pine boughs are threaded with cotton. The earth awakens and takes a breath, the breeze shreds that veil. Stones whose forms were outlines begin to reveal themselves as mottled, lichen-laced. As you drift slowly into the day, what is around you becomes clearer and clearer.

A few weeks ago, we signed ourselves up for a ten-month pre- and post-natal class, offered by the birthing center where we plan to welcome our son into the world. The choice was more instinctual than it was intellectual: we had heard and experienced so much more in a one-hour visit than in so many trips to obstetricians and hospitals, it was like falling into the arms of the Wise. Adela, our midwife tour-guide, was in no hurry whatsoever, and answered every question, posed some of her own, asked newcomers to wait comfortably on the terrace as we talked on and on. When we finally stood and kissed her goodbye, once on each cheek, we stepped out into the sun and shook our heads: where were we? When did people start giving their time so freely (other than ourselves and community-minded close friends)?

The mind is like the body in that it settles over time: these joints, my joints, supple yet some of their spring is past; I dare say the arc of my body has moved beyond its height; and I find my thoughts these days are as informed by a personal history as they are by the all-possible present, gravity being the agent of change.

These thoughts. They are gently urged to earth, so that what was once a bright green fancied flight flutters down to a slightly darker summer tone, or to September’s dust, not somber yet but… sobering. I knew (when first I stood) that gravity pulled on my frame, but hadn’t yet understood how the gravity of time, experienced and therefore set in the stone of my bones, made New in my eyes less likely, almost an act of will: I refuse to allow the prevalent physical violence of Brazil to invade the relative peace of Barcelona, and I resist – to the best of my abilities – the psychological violence of the United States, as it places the beautiful circle of my family and friends under siege.