How It Feels To Be Born

 

How It Feels to Be Born

“The moment, or even hours, of passive, helpless terror when the uterine contractions suddenly begin, and then continue, and continue, or the more active torture of the second stage of delivery, when the cervix opens and propulsion through the birth canal commences, continuing with an unremitting intensification of sheer fright and utter agony, to a climax amounting to an experience of annihilation, and then, suddenly, release, deliverance, light! and the sharp pain of umbilical severance, suffocation until the bloodstream finds its new route to the lungs, and then, breath and breathing on one’s own.”

Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By

 

The most terrifying part must be the suffocation, when you’re out of the womb and have to begin breathing, but you don’t know how to begin, and then somebody slaps your bottom and you scream—and breathe.

 

Except that in our new Age of the Nicey-Nice they don’t slap your bottom anymore; that’s too violent. So you’re on your own in figuring out the breathing.

 

“All of life is sorrowful, born in fear and pain, expiring in fear and pain, and with little in between except more fear and pain.”

The Buddha

And laughter.

[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie: Here We Be. Where Be We?]