Birth Day

Witnessing a birth and holding a newborn baby in your arms is a sure way to get you to thinking about birth and life and the whole process we all go through.  We all enter the world through our mother.  One minute we are comfortable and warm floating inside our mother who has sustained us for 9 months or so and the next we are feeling the strong contractions, the squeezing a pushing, a need to move that forces us out into the world, into our new life. What an amazing, breathtaking experience!

I wonder if we know for sure before hand, while we are still in our prebirth state, what we will encounter when we arrive here on this planet. I imagine us choosing our parents and the experiences we'd like to share with much excitement and thought, determined to come into the world and accomplish great things for ourselves and others.  I'm envisioning us full of hope and joy at the idea of all of the experiences we will have and the lessons we will learn.  I wonder if we stop and think of the work and pain involved in birth and life.  Perhaps we know full well of all the pain and hard work we will encounter and we choose to come anyway.  Perhaps we're oblivious to the idea of pain and hard work and just want to experience living.  Perhaps it's a mixture of both or something we can't even comprehend in our current state of mind.

What I'm noticing lately in my life is that I seem to be going through a new birth...the birth of my self.  I've watched over the past few years how I've grown and seen how I've been nurtured and sustained by many various "mother" figures on my path. The mothering has come in many forms, through friends, coworkers, bosses, family, sometimes even strangers who just happen to enter my life in times of need with just the right thing to say at just the right moment. Under the tender care of these assorted "mothers" I've felt a "new" me grow and form and become ready to reach out and enter the world again.

There have been pains, dark times, anticipation and anxiety of leaving the space were I have become comfortable and yet it feels more and more like it's time to move forward, to come out of that safe, familiar space and be born into who I was meant to be.  I wonder will this be a "new" me or will it be me finding my "old" self, the me I was meant to be, who got lost along the way.

It seems instead of having one grand "birth" day entrance this birth will be more of an easing out bit by bit, day by day, week by week, month by month until eventually I'm fully aware of who I am and what I'm meant to be.  It will take time and patience and some labor and some pain, maybe even some sweat and tears, but in the end there will be joy and it will all be well worth it.