In the womb something inside you already knew you were growing towards belonging. The hunger to belong is not merely a desire to be attached to something. It is rather sensing that great transformation and discovery become possible when belonging is sheltered and true. Belonging is a call to integrity and creativity. The structure of this call illuminates the very nature of belonging. The first belonging is to the body of the mother. Only when desire and destiny help realize this belonging does the embryo grow into self-identity and reach the threshold of belonging to itself. This first belonging is a blind and vulnerable struggle. It is a secret growth in the darkness. Without this primal longing to belong, no individual could ever come into being. When we normally think about people, we inevitably forget that each person actually grew out of this original impulse to belong. This pre-conscious longing grew to become the mind, body, and spirit of a person. This belonging was not a static, fixed attachment. It was alive with desire and the wish to become the one you dreamed.
Even as a little micro-essence of tissue you cling internally to the mother until you develop your own body to cross the next threshold into the distance-filled world. Despite all the scientific inventions that can provide information on the unborn child, the truth is, the really important things remain unknown. Something within you already knows the infinities that lie in wait outside the mother and recognizes that the only way of traversing them is to become a body. To be born is an incredible event, a great disturbance. You are cast out; thrown from the cave into the light. It is interesting that your first moment of experience is a moment of disturbance. In its abrupt dislocation, birth already holds the echo of death. The rhythm of this moment prefigures the subsequent rhythm of your life: parting and coming together. There can be no union without separation, no return without parting. No belonging is permanent. To live a creative and truthful life, it is vital to learn the art of being separate and the generosity of uniting.
Despite its endless and vital artistry, Nature maintains great secrecy and reserve. When we see a pregnant woman, we know that some new person is coming here. Everything else remains unknown. Who that person is, and what she will bring to her family, and world, and what kind of life she will have remain unknown to us and even to the mother, the carrier and the labyrinth of this creativity. This is one of the great privileges of women, to be able to give birth. Mothers are the priestesses of the greatest Eucharist. In and through the mother, empty space is changed into person. The anonymous water element becomes face, body, soul, life, and inner world. To give birth can also be a great burden. Sometimes the weary face of a pregnant mother reveals how her essence is being rifled and her body and mind become implicated in the baby’s destiny. A bond is being developed from which she will never be released. In a sense, she can never part from the one she has carried under her heart. To be involved in Nature’s most powerful mystery can also destroy all illusions and innocence. A friend told me recently that her moment of bleakest disillusionment was in hospital shortly before she went into labour with her first child. She walked out onto the hospital fire escape, looked into the night, and realized her absolute isolation and saw opening before her a never-ending path of responsibility.
There is no other way into the universe except through the body of the woman. But where were you before you were conceived and entered the womb? This is one of the most fascinating in-between times in any life. It is also the one we know least about. Yet it is a journey that each of us has made. In the Western and Oriental traditions, we have a vast architecture of theory regarding life after death; there are bardos, purgatories, Nirvana, and beatific visions. There is a carefully thought-out path of continuity, transfiguration, and final homecoming after death. It is interesting to note the substantial absence, especially in the Christian tradition, of any geography of the time before we were conceived. Maybe it sounds ridiculous to explore this, since we did not exist before we were conceived. This may be true, but it is surely too simple to imagine that one moment there was no sign of you, everything was blank and empty, and then the next moment you began to be there. If you came out of somewhere, then you had to be somewhere before you came. There can be no such apparitions or pure beginnings. As well as having an “afterwards” every person has a “before.” The difficulty in imagining this is that the other world is invisible, and all we have are intimations of our invisible past.
