Brand New Lives

It is not length of life, but depth of life.
                                    -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's funny sometimes how in the midst of all our insanity, the miracles of life can totally pass us by.

Yesterday I finished a short stint in the neonatal intensive care. My role in this job is sometimes to be the privileged person to welcome high risk babies into the world. Birthing can be a difficult thing, especially when you get stuck :) sometimes the little guys do get stuck and it can be a pretty tight fit! So when they come out often they can be pale, floppy, listless, not breathing, heart not beating, goo and muck throughout their lungs ... you get the idea. For a baby, Life sometimes can truly be a dangerous place!

The game is to rub them, pat them, squeeze the little guys, cuddle them, love them and at rarer times to jam breathing tubes in their throat if they really dont want to behave :) but usually, a friendly "Hi there mate! welcome to the world!" suffices. They usually just turn pink, blink, or cry, or sometimes pee on you if you dont get out of the way and then most of the time give a good, healthy scream, a salute and greeting to a new world.

I love those little babies. I love them so much. They are amazing. One of my most peaceful moments is to just stand at the door of the nursery, look out into room of the many little cots, a feel the beautiful energy of care which exists for each of the little lumps of brand new life. It's one of my favourite jobs ever, to look after brand new babies. They are little lumps of beautifulness just waiting to be loved. They are just a wonder to me, when they come out, all brand new. Sometimes you just stand there and look at them. After you put them down on the little resuscitation trolley they often dont do much - they have a bit of a sniff, have a little look around, blink, as though they are just coming to terms with the fact that they have eyes, wiggle and wobble their arms and legs, getting used to the fact that they have them too. Most times they are grumpy and they cry, burp, vomit, pee or poop when they are brand new. But they still amaze me.

What touches my soul is when you get to look into a brand new baby's eyes for the first time. Im often amazed and awestricken by the idea that I am probably one of the first people they see and definitely the first person they have a real interaction with. I am the first person to touch them, to wake them up, to poke and prod them, I am the first to welcome them. And then you look into their eyes. They are magnificent, those beautiful luminous blue-black-brown-green globes, they are endless and so wonderfully full of an indescribable newness. They are just glowing and when I look there, just for that moment, I touch briefly a wonder and a beauty that I cannot describe and cannot forget.

Being a witness to new life often makes you stop and ponder. Yesterday when I was standing there I really started to take a step back from the 'doingness' and started to wonder what it really meant, to be such a brand new helpless vulnerable little person. I started to get a sense of the awesomeness of what lay ahead for these little beings. To think that each of these, from such a small, undeveloped and vulnerable place, will grow up similar to me and have many hours, days, months, years, decades full of the experiences of life. To think of the events, relationships, lessons, joys, pains, passions that these little people have yet to move through just blows me away.  To meet the people they will spend their lives with, to fall in love, to lose, to win, to triumph, to share, to celebrate. That each of these is a Being in themselves capable of living such fullness! I dont know exactly what will happen to each of these but mostly when I stand there, I feel a sense of fullness and Beingness- it is a sense of an unknown potential, but filled with  a Promise.

It makes me glad and fills me with deep appreciation for the experience of Life. It makes me question, acknowledge and honour a miracle - my own existence. Where have I really come from? Where am I going to? What was the promise that I came into this world with? Is my collection of experiences a really fulfillment of that? Just who or what am I?

I just smile. Somewhere inside me I know. But on the outside I dont have all the answers. Yet.