We’ve all been born. Somehow we emerged from the joining of our mother’s egg and our father’s sperm.
A flash in the dark, the flame of desire and a long journey down a dark tunnel is how it all started. The egg waiting in the fallopian tube like a silent planet . . . waiting for the aliens to arrive; a hundred million of them, an armada.
Talk about a hot date, those little guys have a rendezvous and they don’t want to be late. This may be the origin of all our races, our notions of journey and of destination.
We are born in a bubble, floating in intercellular space, attached to our mother’s uterine lining by a tether, not unlike the astronauts floating on their space walks high above the earth.
We float there while our cells multiply exponentially. From the original two that make up the zygote - by 2 weeks we are millions.
By 3 weeks the central nervous system starts to form. By 4 weeks little nubbins that will become our arms and legs appear. By 6 weeks a tiny protplasmic patch of tubular cells begin beating and won’t stop until we die - our heart.
We float and grow and we live in our little bubble and we don’t worry about a thing.
And then we are born. We slide out of our mother’s womb, the doctor cuts the umbilical cord and we take our first breath. An inhalation.
Now we’re living in the air not the water, we are a separate entity, untethered. Unaware that we are independent, though, the world a blur; we still belong to our mother. A sense of identity doesn’t come until later when we notice our toes and fingers and that they obey us in some strange affective way. The desires and curiosities of our mind become apparent. We are somebody.
And the question is: when do we become conscious, when do we come into being? Is it a sleepy sort of nebulous gradual process as our senses come online?
The first glimmers of aqueous light from inside the womb mean nothing to the fetus. How could it? The system of creating meaning and identifying ‘things’ has not yet been activated.
Is it a gradual dream-style awareness as we hear muffled noises coming from somewhere? But there is no ‘where’ yet. Everything just is.
And where did we come ‘from’ in that world where there is no ‘here’ and ‘there’?
Some good questions. Too bad we can’t remember that time. When there was no time.
Cute baby.