Letter to My Child

My Child,

I have been unsure if it is possible to love someone, something unknown. But here you are, making space by stretching the dimensions of who I thought I could be. I have yet to see your face, though you’ve sent a wordless communication with the beat of your heart: “Here I am.” My body, the only home you’ve known, is roped to you by a cord of blood and flesh, a link that blurs the line of distinction between who you are and who I am. Even so, with so little tangibly apprehended, how can I know you? Even in this dark mystery, my devotion to you is absolute.

I was not sure it was possible to know myself, let alone to love myself. Yet the person I am responds beyond knowledge to the energetic pull of you. My body follows ancient maps to navigate your arrival, written in code language that has never been seen or understood in its entirety. In the center of my body is a vortex, an energy field where you lie; it warps time and space around you, realigning my whole being. I know you by these signs: the gradual transformation of my identity, shaped now by a different definition of autonomy; the expansion of my belly and emotional body; the new protective presences I sense around us.

Wherever I go, you go. The air I breathe is yours. The nourishment I take is yours. My rest is your rest. My heartbeat thumps in time with yours. How can we inhabit this body together so comfortably, perfectly held in the lap of destiny? How can we be said to be strangers when I know and love you more than anything I have ever known or loved?

We are all born into the world this way. In time, cords are cut and rot away. Heartbeats are not in rhythm. But what could sever the phenomenological threads of such intimate familiarity, save illusion or ignorance? These conditions are temporary constructions. By illumination, or by death, we will be born again into that Awareness that has known us all since the beginning. Each of us is ever held in an infinite womb of Light, where we have always been Love, and Beloved.

My body will soon confine you in too small a space, and you will break forth into this world, my love. Remember, though, that you never leave the other world. We will always have known one another beyond familiarity, suspended together in the dark and light.

Love always,

Mother