Sometimes, I will revisit, comeback to an unfinished thought, story and embellish upon it,such as today. These grey February days induce a sort of melancholy in me,day after day of no sunshine is a challenge at best to our souls. Often ,I rely on an inspiring story that a random person confides in me,like a ray of warm sun gliding through the haze directly to me to infuse me with radiant heat.I was thinking again lately of the kind of life that has always seemed attractive to me.That is a life closer to the natural cycles of the earth,somewhere that I would grow my own food,be closer to the earth,be intimately immersed in the slight nuances of the changings of the moon,the tide. I would probably tend to some animals and get up before dawn vigilantly awaiting the birthing of a calf. As a doctor, I have had the miraculously good fortune of participating in many human births many times. To this day ,to me there is nothing that surpasses the beauty, majesty, other-wordliness of watching the process of a wet wiggly milky slippery silvery blood stained person slither out, swim into this world,take in their first tenuous breath and open their eyes to their very first images of us,of this earth. I am always intrigued when my farmer friends tell me their stories of the birthing of a calf.
Here is another poem on "birthing" by Deborah Digges,a poet who I admire,This is in tribute and in memory of her passing , from The Writer's Almanac ;She died this past year, in April 2009, after falling from bleachers at a stadium. Police ruled it a suicide.
Once, she and her husband had been out driving and saw a cow on the side of the road struggling to give birth. The calf was coming out the wrong way — and probably wouldn't have survived, so she and her husband jumped out of the car to help deliver the calf. She wrote a poem about it, "The Birthing," which appeared in The New Yorkermagazine in October 2006. She wrote:
"With his whole weight he pushed the calf back in the mother
and grasped the other leg tucked up like a closed wing
against the new one's shoulder.
And found a way in the warm dark to bring both legs out
into the world together.
Then heaved and pulled, the cow arching her back,
until a bull calf, in a whoosh of blood and water,
came falling whole and still onto the meadow."
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