Welcome 4 – Harmony
What is the conversation between the them, in the silence at the center of things? They would speak it if they found it; they would find it if they did not look for it:
— The world is moving inside of me.
— I see the world moving inside of you.
— I am becoming a new, multiple me. The heart is growing toward every horizon. When I stretch toward one, I am pulled by the others. I am fuller than I have ever been. You cannot see all of me.
— I want to see all of you. Your horizons are invisible to me, but I feel them like waves. MY boat is rocking. I am calm.
— Wait for me.
— I wait for you.
Pregnancy is practice in flexibility. Everything in she and in me is pulled and kneaded, bubbling with life, rising under our hands, warm. Everything is whipcord, everything is blinding flashes of light, everything is new music, is already planted and already harvest, everything is sunrising and sunsetting, everything is spring into summer. I feel the deep embrace we shared as a couple pulled apart and pushed back together, embrace that changes in physiology, opens to allow other arms. I feel habits of interrelation crack and open like blessed wounds, unseen hands reaching in and massaging the heart, urging it to expand, more blood must flow. I see the marriage of two being carried high on celebratory chairs into the marketplace full of singing families, elders beaming with their experience being reborn as a couple, young families breathing gratitude newly accompanied, the unmarried and those without children watching and understanding without being able to understand.
What a time.
Amazingly, the woman sustains the man, and the man sustains the woman. I don’t know how they do it. Where the energy was one of passion and joining, it becomes two, the new life asking for a little specialization: nurturing attention on one hand, solid protection on the other, and in the free time between one and the other, perhaps a moment to reach toward one other with hands that are either motherly-soft or warrior-hard.
I guess the less clutching there is, the less rigidity of mind, the more ability there is to subtly and gracefully adjust, in the same way this little Being who is ready to be born shifts an arm, a leg, turns his head downward according to the impulse and the need, prepares for ground. Like little Elan, but over the course of years, I have discovered some ways to harmonize, and am grateful to have been around long enough, to have been curious enough, to have found more flexible ways to be in this body and in this mind.
Two weeks ago – at 36 weeks of pregnancy – we had an opportunity to dance together, the three of us. At think that at this stage of ripeness, no traditional form of dance would have been suitable, but my preferred style is improvised, its movements and points of contact embark from stillness and silence, and the choreography that results from this deep listening is not what should be, but what will be. Sometimes simply standing is eloquence itself.
The beauty of this practice is that it offers an avenue of communication when words are out of reach, or are as intangible and philosophical as my posts of late: the body speaks a truth that the mind on its own might not embrace for days, or for weeks, or even a lifetime.
The woman hears: I am supported. The man hears: I am accompanied. She leans into his weight and in one action carries and is carried by it. He receives her gently with his frame that makes a home for her, for her child, and is a home for her, for their child. By listening to each body’s capability, and responding to What Is in a soundless dance, internal music rises like is a series of affirmations, yes, yes, yes. Two partners saying Yes sing in harmony.
And in that moment or in that movement (the words in this case describe the same thing) the distinction being born into the couple is no longer division, but recognition. As our son is born, we are born into brand-new selves. Acceptance is dance without judgment, is the higher form of understanding.