The discovery of the foot

Her room, stage 2

Her perspective #5

Her perspective #4

Her perspective #2

Her perspective #1

..............

OK, but blogger keeps cropping edges off these perspectives. Specifically the landscape ones.

What, I ask, is so heinous about a dress change?

Her room, stage 2

Her room, stage 1

The Empress... displeased (frequently)

....................

It is amazing to me that human beings come into this world knowing basically three things - how to suck, how to eliminate, and how to cry. Of these three, crying is the only one that is not a purely somatic function - it expresses emotion. Thus it appears we are born knowing how to experience unhappiness but have to learn anything beyond that. Contentedness only comes while asleep. I wonder what this means... existentially.

My own private Knox

The Empress...

......................

...is my own personal crazy wisdom teacher:

She is totally unpredictable. One moment she is smiling broadly, but that big grin turns into a pinched, about-to-cry face in a second. OK, three, maybe. And I have no clue why this happened. And there's nothing I can do to prevent it. I can't freeze her at happiness – she just flows from ecstasy to wrath and back again.

She is unreasonable. If she wants to be fed at 2:46 am, even if she just fed at 1:31 am, then fed she will be. So what if "they" say babies eat every three to four hours at this age. Huh! Then again, she might want to stare at that black picture frame for twenty minutes, and please don't shift her position while she is preoccupied with this.

She insults those who love her most. I am reading right now that the real purpose of a spiritual friend is to insult you. I had no better example than when I kissed her and she let out a big fart in response.

And to all this I respond with unquestioned devotion and commitment. A true spiritual relationship – intimate, surrendered, and filled with tears and excrement.

Parent in Love #4

..................

Last night's sleep schedule:

8:30 PM - midnight: Scheduled solo sleep shift; baby and husband in the living room. Woke up at 10:30, however, panicked - WHERE IS THE BABY???? Frantically pawing through pillows and bedsheets, convinced she should BE THERE. Can't calm down until I check the clock and verify that this is my sleep shift alone. This keeps happening every night for the last four nights.

midnight - 1:30 AM: She feeds, midnight to 12:45. Long, drawing sucks, accentuated by occasional pleasure aaahs. I let her fall asleep on my chest, half reclining against the oversize pillow, watching her grimace, smile and yip through her newborn dreams. I pray she won't start fussing the minute I lay her down. Then I remember the diaper - damn! That's going to wake her up all over again. But she slumbers through the whole change, and I am beginning to believe in miracles.

1:30 AM - 3:45 AM: She sleeps. I wake up sometime during the shift and remember my own dream: I stand on a sunny beach and watch the magnificent waves of the Pacific Ocean lap at my feet. They grow larger and larger, until they are as tall as buildings, then small mountains. The water turns from shimmering blue to threatening gray. One of the waves rises like a dark beast and becomes a hand, its gargantuan fingers towering a mile towards the sky, then falling and merging with the roiling waters. I think, this is a tsunami, and scamper to higher ground as the water washes over the parking lot. Oh, I think, my car is gone, under the ocean now. I climb again, onto a rocky ledge, confident the water won't reach this far. A small country church is ringing its bells in alarm, warning the people of the onrushing water. I take a sweeping look and think it is still beautiful.

3:45 AM - 4:30 AM: She feeds. This time I'm convinced there will be an hour of fussing; things have gone too smoothly so far. She falls asleep, then wakes and remembers she is still hungry. Her eyes wide open at first, scanning, looking decidedly worried, then yielding to the pleasure of the feed, the eyelids slowly begin to droop until she is fast asleep again. I do my slow slide twenty minutes later, armed with a pacifier in my left hand, propping her tiny head in the crook of my right arm.

4:30 AM - 7 AM: She sleeps! She SLEEPS! I do my worried wake-ups every hour to check if she is still there and breathing.

Parent in Love #3

Parent in Love #2

Parent in Love #1

Unfocused #4

............

Just in case you're wondering - these Unfocused series are not at all contrived. They simply happen as the camera slips from my fingers and falls. Or a clumsy pregnant finger taps a click when none had been intended. This is part of the phenomenology of the gravid state.

............

After years of academic work, I am finally indulging pulp fiction. All things vampire, starting with Interview with the Vampire. I suppose it's an obvious choice, seeing as I am sharing my blood with another human being's, quickening inside me, drawing on my life energy to sustain itself.

Self-portrait with belly # 10

After the Walk

Unfocused #3

36 weeks 4 days

Self-portrait with belly #9

Thirty six weeks

Unfocused #2

Unfocused #1

...........

I am a hazard to myself and those around me. Clumsy, trippy, forgetful, exhausted. Loopy, bungling, ungraceful. Scattered, oblivious, dreamy.

...........

Someone said to me today that a pregnant woman's cognitive brain shrinks by four percent. She assures me this is temporary.

The all-transcending mystery of the cosmic process is the only possible direction of the thrust of life, and hence of the possibility of freedom - whatever it may ultimately mean. Again, we are reminded of Augustine's idea that unless people looked in this direction, they were hopelessly curvatas, somehow less than fully human, fetishized and bent upon narrow and ignoble things. This was the difference between cupidditas and caritas, of love for things and love for God. And what is "love" for any living creature,except the sentiment that the universe is alive and significant - alive and significant according to the creature's own living energies.

~ Ernest Becker, Beyond Alienation

Underpass #3

Underpass #2