Together in the Space Between

After what hopefully is a moment (maybe more than a moment) of ecstasy for the bodies and the souls of two individuals, a solitary explorer finds his way to the prize he has been seeking, and penetrates the cellular boundaries that open for him. The ovum is now being fertilized. A process is initiated that most would consider miraculous. For a human being the gestation period of 40 weeks is approximated to be the length of time necessary for the completion of this phase of life. The birth of a baby is a familiar process to all of us since we all began in such a way. Much discussion revolves around the concept of when a human life begins, but there is little question of when the actual process that results in life begins. ‘Pro-life’ proponents can reasonably argue that life is present at the beginning of the process; while pro-choice advocates respond that the fetus is not viable (physically fitted to live) until much later in the process. The eventual culmination of the process is not apparent at the beginning of the process but is embedded in the process from the very start. The process itself is perceived by those involved in it from their personal perspective. Nausea and hormonal shifts tell the host mother that life has begun. The process takes what it needs from the host, in a very parasitic way, because it needs to survive. The father, on the other hand, must reorganize his priorities to fulfill what is expected of him. Big changes are coming and, in fact, have already begun. Meanwhile back in the uterus, our baby is morphing from shape to shape leaving off, those traces of past histories of evolution to attain the semblance of humanity. At no point is the fetus free of its past, or free of its inexorable movement toward its goal. Then there is the trauma of birth. From the mother’s perspective, a force is acting within herself, taking over her body, to bring to completion the separation from the host. Most women would not consider giving birth a pleasant experience, but a necessary one to attain the intended outcome. And because of the force of love; they accept the difficulties involved as part of the process. The mother and father are usually happy about the outcome. The baby may not be as happy with his or her situation. Adam (or Eve) has been ripped from the comfort of his womb; an ideal environment to ‘become’, and then thrust into separateness. He must find a way to obtain oxygen for his lungs. He is not finding this a pleasant experience; but there is no question about going back. The force of life is driving him. Then his mother takes him in her arms and coos a comfort and he experiences a new kind of love. She puts him to her breast and he reflexively suckles to find a new kind of food. Everything is new, but it’s not all bad or it’s not all good. It is. And it is not finished. It is a process. Originally, in our evolutionary history as a human species, we perceived the skies as being in process. The sun governed our day and the moon governed our night. The stars moved across the sky and there was a recognition of cycles in which the sky was not static. We did not perceive the universe as static until we realized that the earth was moving and that changed our perspective. Only then did the universe seem static. The ancient peoples were in touch with the process of the universe and the process of life as they lived it. Even now, native peoples who are relatively untouched by our modern age retain the understanding of process in their lives. In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was not static. Rather, it was expanding, a find that revealed that the universe was apparently born in a Big Bang. The telling point of a process is that it is never static. Evolution is a process, and the exact instants of change are difficult to pinpoint; so at any one time the process may appear to be in stasis. A fact that complicates the picture, is that our perception of time is relative to our position in the universe. The star we see at this moment is actually a stream of light that was produced many thousands of years ago. It is possible that the star is no longer in that position in the universe and has become a super nova, or a black hole or something else that will become evident to us many thousands of years hence, after the tell tale light has reached our position. With the dawn of the industrial age, civilized societies moved away from an agrarian lifestyle that relies on the cycles of seasons, to a consumer society that produces and procures products manufactured in apparent separation from the cycles of the earth.