I wonder if all parents experience the awe, this unimaginable complexity and mysterious unfolding? How is it possible? The union of two cells explode and become Carly Elizabeth; heart beating, ten fingers and ten toes, deep gray-blue eyes, sensing, learning, changing every moment, never to be quite the same again, like all the stars and the sky, and just like you and me. Surely every parent must, in their own way.
Today is August 29th, Carly Elisabeth’s birthday, one month and counting, along with 7,257,214,905 others just like her. Yet, none are really the same, not a single one. Joseph Chilton Pearce noted; ‘We have this marvelous play between unity and diversity. There’s only one field, the universal field of which all brains draw. No two brain structures are ever alike, they have the same makings, the same stuff, but they’re never put together in quite the same way.’ Our lives are sculpted by our point of view, falsely morphed into an identity. Look from here and Carly is unique. Look from there and she is the same as everyone else, unity and diversity, different ways of seeing.
Remember looking through two ends of a telescope. From one end we appear all almost identical. Zoom out and at a certain distance all seven billion of us look like bacteria wiggling around doing very important stuff that too looks pretty much the same, just like all the other mammals who experience their experience so very similar to us, sans our symbols that mystify and confuse. And from the other end we are unique as snowflakes, crystal patterns that have never been and will never be again. Wow, Carly Elizabeth is just like all of us and just like all of us she is unique, like all the stars, the grass, each life on all the trees and the wind, all creation moving.
Carly Elizabeth is the same as all the children in Gaza and Tel Aviv, Bangalore, Shanghai, Kansas City, Rio and Rwanda. The light shining in her eye is the same as the light in shining in Pixel our cat’s, shining in the bears, mice, the elephants and whales. Her need to feel safe, at home, welcome and appreciated is the same there’s, each and every one in their own way. It really doesn’t matter what home looks and smells like. Home is home and that is all any of us really need, and we do. Brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, grandma and even the grump next door, we feel the same feelings, want the same closeness, need acceptance and affectionate touch, just like Pixel and the elephant standing alone in the Serengeti.
Speaking with James W. Prescott the other day, who has researched the origins of love and violence more than most, we wondered if this miracle called Carly Elizabeth and all the other miracles just like her will survive another 100 years? Maybe? After all, miracles do happen. Just look at her sleeping in her beautiful mother’s arms.
It would be so easy to do unto others as we would have done unto us. No more water boarding and beheadings. No more plucking an eye for an eye leaving everyone blind. No more skinhead police shooting Michael Brown’s or Carly Elizabeth standing by him, or the children in Gaza or on Main Street in any town in the world. No more circumcisions or desperate suicides. It would be so easy. Just flip the telescope around and see that we are the same, need the same, all of us, including Pixel, the elephants, the whales and coral reefs being slaughtered by Navy microwaves gone mad. It would be so easy to have our children and all the children look through that end rather than the other, the end that sees only our fears, justifications and defenses and nothing else; me, mine, my gang, my political party (which is a gang by another name), my nation, my solders, my money, my corporation, mine! From one end of the telescope me and mine is all we see. Looking through the other; me and mine doesn’t exist nor does all the violence, wars and abuse that way of looking and its identity creates and so easily.
With a snap of a finger, behold I make all things new. It is a fact. Ending the greed and the violence is just that easy. Flip the telescope around. Look and you will see. We are one family, one vast creative movement and endless expression called life, ever-changing, never the same like Carly Elizabeth today, one month old and counting.
To be with her and with all the other children of all the species of the world, or for that matter to be with anyone or any living thing, you need to turn off the dumb-phone, the computer, the 5,000 channel satellite dish TV, Fox Nonsense, the car radio and all the blather in your head, all the judgments and self-centered fears and projections and defenses these recycle, and once all that noise is gone, to look, listen, feel and respond by doing to and with Carly Elizabeth what you would want done, if you were her, because you are! And never stop doing just that every second of every day for the rest of this life and all the other lives to come because life, creation is moving, changing and is never the same like Carly Elisabeth, like you and me. That is what she taught me today, silent, expansive sensitivity and action. I wonder what she will share with me tomorrow, a new day that will be unlike any that has ever been or will be again.
Michael Mendizza
One month old today and counting….