Family Wilds

Our Little Wild Woman is Two!

The morning of our daughter's second birthday started out with a game of hide and seek.  What that looked like - the special birthday version - was her running straight from her bed to the bathroom yelling "hide and seek," followed by a slam of the door and a lock of the door.  An hour later she was giddily admiring the firetruck and hanging out with the firemen that came to help us figure out how to free her.  Obviously, we weren't as prepared as we should have been.  We are now...well, for this particular scenario anyway. 

These past two years have been so many things, but most of all, they have been uplifting.  It's hard to think of one word that fits better.  She has made our lives so much more full and exhilarating (firetruck and all) than we could have ever imagined.  I wrote the following poem a few months before she was born.  Nea and I were pouring over with love, excitement and anxiety; we were eager and momentary.  We were on the edge of something, but neither had any idea what exactly that was.  When the two of us read this poem again on that first night our daughter went to bed as a two-year-old, we both agreed that we still feel the exact same way.  Life is remarkable. 

Awaiting Your Birth

 Little heartbeats

powerful like words

whispering and pulsing

loving and logical.

Little hands

little fingers flailing and falling

from the edge of Earth

and into every aching and anxious

piece of us, you.

Little legs, little toes

dancing and directing energy

beyond the place where warmth has long turned  

to chaos and quiet.

Little eyes examining

your little room of biology and millennia; nature

making you magic, humanity, humor.

Little one of a mighty Mother

little one of a moonstruck Father

little to do, but teach you and shape you, and dream you

and speak you

and to know that deep in your little lightning heart

you will find ours, too.

Sometime, when I feel as though I can properly do it justice, I want to write my perspective of our birth story.  My wife will forever be a goddess in my eyes.  She is an amazing woman who brought into this world a miraculous little girl that will surely grow to be an amazing woman as well. One day we'll probably both write about the it, but honestly, I still don't think I have the words.  I'm a very fortunate man.

Looking forward to another beautiful year,

Pablo

You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+.  We have more content at those cyberspaces and share posts from our outdoor and parent blogger friends. 

 

 

 

 

Seven Years of Amazing

Today is our wedding anniversary, and this blog is about to get all kinds of mushy!  We've been married for seven years (together for a total of ten).  We feel very fortunate to have found each other.  The best part has been the past two-and-a-half years, which have covered a pregnancy, the birth of our daughter, and a whole new world to explore.  Here is an excerpt from our wedding ceremony, which we wrote together.  The Margaret Atwood poem meant a lot to us then and it holds even more power for us now. 

A more passionate description of the emotions, actions, and reactions that embody a relationship of this spirit comes from the poem by Margaret Atwood entitled “Variations on the Word Love”.  In this poem she professes to her lover, “Then there’s the two of us.  This word is far too short for us, it has only four letters, too sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars that press on us with their deafness.”  She continues in the final stanza to agonize about the litany of emotions trapped within the very small confines of those four letters.  She writes, “This word is not enough, but it will have to do.  It’s a single vowel in this metallic silence, a mouth that says O again and again in wonder and pain, a breath, a finger grip on a cliff side.”

It is from this cliff side, from this edge of what reality can bear, it is from this seat on the outskirts of the universe that Nea and Pablo hold onto each other, falling loudly, falling silently, falling into a love that they’ve already fallen into.  Their histories, which are immersed in memories of all those in this room and many not in this room have brought them to the people they have become, have brought them to this  love and to the opening of this new path.

Best wishes to you all, and thank you for sharing all these experiences of the past several months with us on Family Wilds!

-Pablo and Nea

Because of Her Eyes

We've seen trees before.  We've seen rivers and oceans, mountains and rocks, animals of all shapes, speeds, and sizes.  It's an astonishing world.  Before our daughter was born, we saw all of these things, but not like we've seen them since she was born.  Her eyes have become ours, and they have shown us things we've never seen before, even though we have.  Entries to this blog will not always be poetic, or beautiful, or happy, but they will certainly be a result of the way we interact with the world now that we have a new set of eyes.  We want those eyes to roam, explore, analyze, love, question, we want them to be everything eyes ought to be and more.  We'll do our best to make sure they see as much as possible, so we can too.

Family Wilds

Because of her eyes, feral

at every novel twitch of the universe, we see

again and anew.  Because of her eyes, naked

and warm, our family wilds into the world.

We navigate veins, viscous and ferocious

feeding life into dirt and sky, cutting

across stone, breathing into the mouth 

of their mother, a blue woman

bigger and more dynamic than night.

We ramble mindfully through immense

swaying arms shedding their colors

across our feet, which we collect and kindle

into flame beneath static fingers, left

like resin upon the skin

of a great green woman; her exhales

thick and gray and more wonderful than the blaze.

We traverse the green woman’s trodden bones

where the ground falls only to be caught

by something more intimate than the ground

ever seems to actually be.  We yield

to creatures, their curved spines, searching tongues

and oscillating dreams staking claim

to an evolution gravity cannot oppress.

We are silent and watchful as our air becomes plump

with the blue woman’s flesh

and returns it harshly and lovingly to the green woman

wild and alive with the very small

and beautiful things that only we will know

because of her eyes.