10.30.03 ~@~ 11:00 a.m.

Oh wonder of wonders, our dear friends had their baby on Tuesday, and I have been in this wierd state of enamoured bliss for two days. Goodness me, he is beautiful. Just perfect pink and soft and emitting that powerfully potent "baby smell". No, not the poopy smell, the deliciously soft baby-skin smell...

Oh yes, I am in love.

This event has my mind reeling with all sorts of spiritual notions of birth and life, scientific questions of "I wonder if he's dreaming?" and many thoughts of the amazing capabilities of the human body.

I've been thinking about "the body" lately anyway. Specifically, this almost 28-year-old speciman that I haul around. This body that dances and hikes, that strikes crazy yoga poses and aches from gardening. This body with a fast metabolism and a sometimes wacky heartbeat. I've been taking note of the way that things have changed for this shell since I was 18. The change in the elasticity of skin even within 10 years. The fine crow's feet lines. The butt cheeks that are much less perky than they used to be (damnit).

I've had this habit throughout my life of taking specific moments in time, not life-changing moments, or special occasions, but just plain ordinary moments, and saying to myself, "Remember what this looks like now. Remember the smell/ taste/ feeling of now," and filing it away somewhere to recall later, and dig up that feeling of being 16 and sitting on my roof to the house that is now sold and gone. Or baking in the sun when I was 20 on spring break with friends. The smell of the sea. Or flying across the ocean and feeling real fear at the airplane turbulence. Attempting to immerse myself in the feeling so much that it soaks in, embedds itself in my memory.

Some of these feelings I lose, but some stay and pop up occasionally. Often when I'm swimming in feelings of nostaglia.

Well, back to the body...this body, with it's sags and lines and scars. With it's skin that is clearer than it's ever been, and a belly that's not quite as toned. It seems that no matter how much we rag on our bodies for their quirks and things we'd like to change, taking a mental (or physical) picture of how it envelopes us at various times in our lives serves as an imprint of us: Those toned legs that danced ballet for 15 years at age 18 were fabulous, really, even if I hated them at the time. Now they've changed...but there is something else I should try and love now...because 10 years from now we will all look back (or we should) and say, "Damn, I wish I'd understood that my ass really did look good in those rhinestone hotpants."

(Okay, seriously, no one looks good in rhinestone hotpants...it was just to prove a point, mind you)

So I expect someday when I do decide to get pregnant, when this body starts changing with pregnancy, that I will lose some of what it is now. It will change and grow and get older and expand (and probably contract...although I'd keep those expanded boobs, I tell ya).

Really, it's all such a cool thing.

The Karma of Literature... BookCrossing.com