Baby Boon

Two precious baby girls came into my life last week: in New York Lorelei who is all-American and in San Francisco Amisa who is all-Newari, the Newars being the original inhabitants of Nepal. Both are pure and perfect, little rays of sunshine breaking through the storm that is our world.

They look so peaceful and rosy in person and in photos, I haven’t the heart to tell them better luck next time. Life in the new world they’ve just discovered is a disaster epic in the making. Life’s so amok somebody is circulating word around the internet that crisis hotlines have been outsourced to south Asia call centers so if you get one in Pakistan and say you’re calling because you’re suicidal, they will perk up and jubilantly ask if you can drive a truck.

I couldn’t bring myself to say: Girls, it won’t be easy to grow up. Now that the scallywags are running the planet, there might not be any dry land or clean air left for you. Shame, personal responsibility, decency and privacy are already as diminished as the polar icecap. And forget about airports and airplanes unless you want to know what masochism feels like.

The newborns don’t know it hasn’t stopped raining here in California for two months as though the universe is crying from our sucker punches or a cosmic nanny is trying to wash away our spilled common sense. Or that water is simply trying to fill the vacuum of moral leadership because Mother Nature does abhor a vacuum. Science says so.

These five and eight pound cherubs simply let us know we still get some things right—in the good old-fashioned pre-internet, pre-television, o hell, pre-iron age way. The more things change, babies being born with ten perfect toes and one little nose stays the same. Life renews itself despite our best efforts to destroy it.

It’s eerie to be reminded we were all little, pure and innocent once, rosy with promise before stuff happened. I was holding little pink pants, realizing I must have fit into a pair like that one January long, long ago when I too was four days old. But of course since I can’t remember what I was supposed to pick up at the store today, I know nothing about it. I just know right now I can’t fit three fingers in one leg of those little pants. I wanted to cry along with Amisa. I wanted to tell her there was a cartoon in the New Yorker of her birth day with a fortune teller rubbing her radiant crystal ball and telling the anxious young woman across from her: “You will make the same foolish mistakes you have made before, not only once but many many times again.”

But I figured it was easier to end her suffering than dwell on my own. So I held her against my body, very tightly, her head pressed in one hand, the rest of her in the other. I swayed and rocked as I swaddle-hugged her in my arms. Softly I sang: Om mani padme hung with the Disney-fed aspiration of turning into a fairy godmother who wards off obstacles and suffering even though I arrived in a small Toyota and not a pumpkin carriage.

Truth told, I mixed in a round or two of the first words of that standard lullaby row, row, row your boat because I discovered a few weeks ago while using rubber rope for an ersatz rowing workout, you can sing that line in the same lilting cadence as Chenrezig’s mantra. Also the idea of moving along gives impetus to your sense of Dharma practice. Om mani padme hung, row, row, row your boat, om mani padme hung…

Before long, the four-day-old was asleep, and with the barest hint of a smile on what had been a bewildered little face. I don’t know whether it came from my off-key crooning, my erratic rocking or my holding her tightly for dear life, bonded one degree short of Krazy glue. But I didn’t care. I was awed at having turned a being from suffering to peaceful in a matter of minutes. And we aren’t even related by blood or DNA.

You have to hand it to the Buddha. He said the only way Bodhisattvas could appease or attenuate suffering was to treat all beings as their own precious child. He told everyone to be a mother clinging fast to every living creature the way I was to that Newar newborn. He wanted men to cultivate the maternal instinct that, I am told, popped right up in Lorelei’s mother.

Her father was reported to be “very supportive but a little timid with the direct care.” Because that male fear is probably as old as time and babies, the Buddha’s great insight was to establish the philosophical and physical discipline of Dharma specifically to sculpt men into gifted caretakers and givers. He recognized they have to be taught to connect to others the way mothers are physically attached in and then out of utero.

The Buddha’s belief in maternity as the antidote to suffering is neither obscure nor arcane. Tibetans display it in the ma of lama and torma. Yes, ma does mean mother: it means the lama is wise like a mother to her child and torma is giving away and feeding others like a mother feeds her child. Prajnaparamita, ultimate wisdom, is always portrayed as a woman called mother of the Buddhas.

Every paramita is brought to you at once when you are tending a new baby: generosity, discipline, patience, exertion, concentration and wisdom. Here is a shot at true transcendence. Think of the ultimate kindness of changing a diaper, gladly helping someone else to clean up their mess. Think of how another's life is purposefully sustained and not shut out by women breastfeeding and men running at all hours of the night with heated bottles that aren’t rum or cognac or even cocoa. Think of how money is so freely given for the goods of another. Think of me going back tomorrow to sing Om mani padme hung…life is but a dream.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

http://www.sandygarson.com

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