Changing Seasons

This is a birth announcement! Really, it is. I'll get to it. But because I see everything as being connected to everything else, I can't think about anything in isolation. I find myself prompted to want to draw you, my patient reader, into the labyrinth of connectivity.

The most recent birth was textbook. And thinking of texbooks make me consider the reality that "by the book" means nothing, really, except that certain events have been observed to occur a certain way with a greater degree of frequency than in other ways. Births, for example, even "by the book," are laborious by definition, and that's when everything goes "right." As any of my blog readers know, I've become all-too-familiar with the other kind, the kind that requires medical or surgical intervention, and that even with intervention sometimes has tragic outcomes.

Those past experiences of non-textbook births, the near-deaths of mamas and the actual deaths of puppies, have insidiously expanded beyond memory and into an internalized narrative of negative expectation that essentially dictates my responses in the present time and prevents me from accurately perceiving what's happening in front of my eyes, since my mind's DVR player is set to auto-replays of "tapes" from the past. I begin sleeping fitfully a couple of weeks before an impending due date. I fret when the mamas appear to me to be even slightly off-feed or listless or uncomfortable. If labor doesn't commence on schedule, I'm a a nervous wreck, imagining the worst-possible scenarios, from dystocia to a ruptured uterus. When labor does commence, I'm a basket case until every last pup is greedily suckling and mama dog is relaxed and attentive.

So much for the wonder of birth, huh? As a small child, I trusted Nature. I'd watch mama cats, dogs, pigs, or whatever other creature didn't mind my presence as they brought forth life, and it never occurred to me to imagine that anything I could do would be of any greater benefit than the immanent presence of the forces of selection that had perfected this process. I was a witness to miracles, and believed in them fully and worshipfully.

So, what accounts for the transformation from celebrant to a gargantuan worrywart? I could argue that I have good reason to be anxious, that past experiences have given me legitimate reason for my reactions. But there's the thing, the "reactions" are in response to situations that occurred in the past, not the present, and what possible good comes from being disconnected from the present? Events take place only in the present, and we have enough to do to process and comprehend even a fraction of what is actually happening in any given moment, let alone if we're not really tuned in, if we're living in a tape-loop inside our heads. I wonder how many mistakes I've made, how many possibilities I've sundered, because my current actions were responsive to the internal dictates of my fears of history, not present realities.

Granted, a heightened and informed awareness of indications of trouble can, and in my experience as a breeder certainly has, trigger interventions that can be literally life-saving. But what happens to trust, and patience, and wonder, and joyous participation in an event that is larger than my own life, is indeed the fundamental instauration of life?

I'm working on that...on acknowledging that I have no real power, no real control, that all things that I experience are created in my own head. The experience is my own. There may, or may not, be a capital-R reality "out there," but the only reality I can experience is that which I allow to reverberate inside my skull. So, henceforth, my aim is to reclaim that trusting, curious, celebratory, and altogether more wise awareness I seemed to possess during my childhood.

Thankfully, Ember gave me an opportunity to witness miracles again, as three weeks ago she delivered six pups "by the book." All I had to do was catch and towel-dry. At three weeks, they've devoured their first meals and are just as perfect as Mother Nature intended. My task is to be attentive now, to respond to the needs of the present, to enjoy the process as it unfolds, not exist in a limbo within the bars of my own fear.