Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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We ask ourselves, is having a baby an experience? Of course it is not not an experience, we think, but this expression strikes us as too weak. As if only one of the rooms in our apartment could ever be lit (even though it has large windows and we set up lamps everywhere). There is something seamless in our being with the baby, something indissoluble, that no light can shine on and that no darkness can cause to disappear. In our search for the sensory organ that would enable us to perceive it, we are distracted by our baby’s nose and by a mirage that appears to streaming out of it in the warm evening air (or are we just imagining this?).

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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 In a cold wind and beneath a radiant blue (but rejecting) sky, we (the baby, I) walk undeterred through this first small autumn storm. We let leaves fall on us, let chestnuts and acorns rain down on us, let the wind whoosh in our ears, and don’t mind it when our eyes tear and our noses start running. We are similar: the sounds from our mouths are just sounds that waft away quickly. What we hear does not remain unheard, and what we see we gladly give back. And then, when we rest for a moment and chestnuts clatter down on us, we do not respond to this rage with the old passion. We are similar: we don’t collect.

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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oder über den Online-Buchhandel

It is as if this fairytale were alive in us from early on: the fairytale of how the baby was overcome. A fairytale we are used to telling each other with a certain pride. Once upon a time we were a baby, the fairytale begins, and it ends with: And then came a day when we were no longer a baby. We were just like the baby, we tell ourselves, but now we are very different from the baby. It is a fairytale that makes us happy without enabling us to shake off our unhappiness. As we tell ourselves this story, we feel a little lonely. When we tell it to our baby, he gives us a steely look: Spare me your fairytales!

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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We (the baby, you, I) observe with dismay the premature mobilization of babies. Everywhere hands are stretched down or up to offer support to the babies, as if no time were left to learn how to stand and walk. This haste strikes us as predatory. As if babies have been babies long enough, as if it were high time to drive the baby out of the baby. A strange reason occurs to us: we fear the baby. His way of being (of being whole) even fills us with anxiety. Only a persistent gaze at our baby can protect us from that.

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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The teaching begins early (earlier than we always thought), begins with the baby’s first breath. This initial teaching is a wordless beginning: it begins with the body. When we are being taught (letting ourselves be taught), we should always remember: each teaching begins with the body. It is more capacious, more unfathomable than the greatest mind. This is hard to remember. It is hard to remain faithful to the miracle of our baby’s body (about which he himself makes not the least kind of fuss). Especially when the first teaching is: be silent.

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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oder über den Online-Buchhandel

Is everything we observe and experience in our baby preparatory training for his future life? Is what comes later prepared for and made possible by what came earlier? Does the earlier serve the later (and what if it were the other way around)? Is development the supreme law to which our baby is subject? Even though this does not seem incorrect to us (or not correct), we cannot believe it. We feel a sweet envy of our baby’s absentminded grip on the little juggler’s ball with the grinning face, envy too of the persevering fist holding onto the ball without a thought of earlier or later, and also without a thought of the loss that arises in our minds when we experience our own grasping and holding on as a disconcertingly bankrupt gesture.

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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A difficult exercise, which we are kindly being given in installments: our baby’s locomotion. Until now, the baby (lying on his belly or back) was always at the center of our attention; now this whole center seems to be shifting. The baby’s efforts will no doubt reach their goal: he will creep, crawl, and drag his way out of the (our) center. Our well practiced foundation is shaking and shifting, and we don’t know yet where we are headed. Nevertheless the baby remains at the center of our attention, even if in his urge to move on, he takes the center with him. (Uncertainly, we watch our baby: how he tries to advance, his face strained with the effort, letting out short, choppy gasps, as if he were hauling, pulling, lifting, shoving a tremendously heavy load.)

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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Although again and again we do numerous things with our baby anew (feeding, changing, carrying him around, smelling his head . . .), it never seems to us that we are repeating something. It even seems to us that repetition is out of the question and impossible, that it is not the kind of thing that occurs in reality. Whether repetition is the result of a cardinal error or is based on fundamentally mistaken assumptions concerning the nature of time makes no difference to us: We know we cannot rely on our memory. But this does not mean that, in the absence of repetition, there is constant novelty (and while we are still wondering about that, our baby is once again plucking at the fine little hairs on our lower arms, at your invisible ones and my visible ones.)