in the small things...

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Warm enough to keep the windows open now, hear the voices from other houses, children crying, families sitting to dinner. Swallows call to each other in the evening air, summer is just around the corner. Rainy days of spring, new flowers, white roses. People whistling opera tunes in the street. Working with the earth, smelling it on my hands. Dreams of past lovers, dreams of future lovers. My brother coming to visit. Libraries, restlessness.

thoughts - new life and old rituals

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Two newborns, now a few days ago. Beautiful news, a couple that was getting too old, worried they'd never have children. Twins, a boy and a girl.
And around the miracle of life I notice something new. Actually, something old, as old as the first family on Earth. As old as humanity.
Beneath the varnish of twenty-first century western behavioural patterns. Rituals that still accompany every rite of passage, rituals that keep the community close-knit, that make family feel as tribe. Rituals for death, rituals for love, rituals for life.
The twins are not just their parents'. They are part of all of us. I feel like it was all of us giving birth: me, my cousins, my mother, my grandmother, my aunts. All of us then together, as if hugging in a circle over the real mother, as if protecting her in her vulnerability.
And no, I didn't forget the men. I didn't forget because it wasn't their role to play. Or so it feels. The news of the birth was passed from woman to woman. And, even though my blood relation in this case is to the father, my uncle, I didn't contact him. I contacted the mother. Because it is the natural way for things to happen.
It was all through us, the birth, the news, the fussing (did they cry, are their eyes open, do they have hair, how much do they weigh).
As it is all through the women with death. I'm thinking of the ritual processions of women crying in ancient Roman funerals. I'm thinking of my grandmother holding on to a coffin. Women as bearers of the history of a family, women as storytellers, women as the structure of civilisation.