Becoming

To grow is to go beyond what you are today.

Stand up as yourself.

Do not imitate.

Do not pretend to have achieve your goal, and do not try to cut corners.

Just grow.

--Svami Prajnanpad

***

I am surrounded by notebooks, and I am taking notes. Like an archeologist, I am looking for clues about the piece (a book?) I am trying to write. I want to find the veins that traverse it, that bring meaning to it’s peripheries. I am re-reading all the scribbled pages and documents I’ve written since the winter of 2004 when I was hugely pregnant, exhausted, and severely dislocated from my sense of self. It is startling and sometimes funny to go back and read all the thoughts I’ve dutifully recorded.

Over and over againI write the same things, tugging at the girdle of phrasing, couching my words this way and then that---trying to get closer to truth. And then over and over I forget.

I find I’ve written things down that make me laugh out loud. Like this:

“I look around the apartment today and think: god, I’ve all but killed the houseplants.”

Other things make me go quiet inside, the way a bird must feel after it has landed. Like this:

“The map of your identity changes when you love someone. “

**

“On the train home, we slice through the dark—an isolated rectangle of light and breath and shifting weight.” **

“The days of recovery from labor and bonding with Bean have blurred together into a continuous present. I find I am unable to think very far forward or backward and instead end up lingering in the moment doing nothing except watching and listening to my son breathe.”

** “His little fingers curl around my thumb, and I am learning humility now. The moments of each days fabric have become a string of little wonderments. Little things matter now. Like coffee, and the incredible smell of his hair.”

** “Everyone lives through periods of intense change, yet few give pause to these moments of turbulence. Few are present and reflective right in the moment of becoming.”

**

I’ve started to feel present in the story I am trying to write for the first time, and have begun to realize that it is more than a story about birth (my son’s) or death (my father’s) or love (my parents, my own). It is a story about becoming.

I want to know your stories of becoming.