The Still Point...

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered.
Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time."

-T.S. Eliot - from "The Four Quartets"

I first read this passage when I was studying in Vienna almost 10 years ago. It seemed to be the first thing that named the sacred moments that found me while abroad: when time became an invitation into a wider world. I was aware of a beauty, tangilbly distant, that dared me to reach out towards that "still point."

Turner's birthday is the second time I have felt this way. When he turned one, it was a ceremony with all of the first birthday rituals that we create - most notably, the expectation that the child will submerge his/her top half into the cake. While I look fondly upon that snowy night a year ago, I was struck by the reverence that I felt for the day this year. Perhaps it is the distance from that beautiful moment - the one that I wish I could relive again and again as they placed a living, breathing new soul onto my tired body - insisting I look back with awe. Not as exhausted, not still an idiot at parenting, not stinking of breast milk, I look back differently this year. I know that as he grows that moment fades but it also becomes an exacting invitation for the point, the still point when I first met my child.

I feel heavy with the thought of other children being born, even with the holy aura that surrounds their coming into the world, into the chaos, the wars, the poverty where so many lives begin. My prayer is naive, that it all stops, so that in the midst of the crazy joy that is experienced in new life those present do not also have to come back to a reality that ignores the the sanctity of the soul that has entered us.