As I write this I can hear a bird from the back yard, through my open window. I suddenly came alive again about two weeks ago, when the sun came out and my blood started moving. I realized that I'd been in hibernation for most of the past six months, my body was sleeping and that affected my mind. Oh, yes, I know I was at those meetings, I attended births, I wrote stuff. But I was moving through a sludge of hormones that were not letting me wake up.
How much of what we do and feel is just about chemicals? We are synapses, elements, neurons, electrons, and those little neutrinos and prions are part of us as well. Where's the "me" that feels happy when the sun finally shines?
I watched the hockey game last night. Oh, what testosterone! What violent ballet! What ballerina skill those large men have, and how I love to watch them jostle and spin their way across the frozen water. I am happy when my team wins, sad when they lose.
When I am accompanying a woman giving birth, I remember that we are all part of a net of atoms, molecules and love and I enter into that shimmering net with an open heart. Her hormones pass to me and we make the journey together. Even if it is in the dead of winter, when I take my son to school and pick him up from school in the cold and dark, the hormones of birth are warm and bright. Small punches of light in a darkened window. Just like the cardinal in my back yard in the winter whiteness, when the snow covers everything and he is a patch of crimson and a sharp song in the darkening day.
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