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Our baby is not as little as we always thought. His size is a kind of parody of our own size – which immediately makes him seem bigger, without making us seem smaller. The subject of size can be easily confusing to us. We would have no objection to a measure that would reassure us in this matter (such as a reliable metric ruler). We are intimately familiar with our size, and are fond of knowing it, and yet this fond familiarity is easily confused by a baby (we remember, it was never easy to measure our baby, he didn’t want to stretch out to accommodate our tape measure, as if there was a natural resistance to this endeavor). Perhaps, our baby says (with a voice we have never heard before), you should try it with my weight. And indeed our baby’s weight has doubled since his birth! But what exactly are we supposed to try with it?

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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We take pictures of our baby (like everyone), many pictures, it’s easy to take them, it doesn’t require any skill or artistry, it’s effortless, almost automatic. When we look at the pictures then, joy, pride, and happiness don’t exactly dissipate, but the pictures feel false to us, untrue. As if they were on the wrong side. We are unable to harmonize their multiplicity with the one image we carry inside us, an image which we nevertheless feel it would be inappropriate  (vain and mistaken) to call singular. Maybe what we carry inside us is not an image, we think before grasping our baby under his arms, holding him in front of us and looking at him.

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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What the child is, is not the baby. The two have a different nature. The difference is not as great as the baby’s difference from us, but it is a basic difference (sometimes we think that babies have no nature of their own, which is why they sometimes seem so vastly withdrawn from us). Thus little children who live in our house come to visit the baby, toy with him, squeeze him, lift him up, carry him around; they neither ask nor hesitate, they are close to the baby and want to be close to him (and for them, being close always means being close with their own bodies); and yet this closeness comes to a sudden end; from one moment to the next the children leave the baby in peace and remove themselves from his sphere. This is something the children can and are permitted to do: to leave the sphere of closeness (they are after all so close to babies). We, the most distant, on the other hand, stay (staying close, after all, is our practice).

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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Is that our baby (on this radiant fall day) rolling in the fallen leaves that lightly and softly cover the earth? An intimate radiance: the radiance of sky (blue), the radiance of leaves in the trees (brown, yellow, orange), the radiance of foliage around the stems (in pretty layered hues). Strongest of all is the radiance on the ground, down there (is that our baby rolling about there?) the light of the leaves is a simple revelation: here is the passage for him who wants to rise. There is our baby, rolling about. How easily we lose sight of him in the light.

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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It seems to us that we can see, hear, and feel what the baby sees and hears and feels. We know this is a mistaken notion but find it difficult to rid ourselves of the illusion. Maybe it’s because we are in the same place as the baby or in his immediate proximity. But it may be that our senses have met in the strange communion that is found in the great moments of love. Or else the baby shows, in his marvelously complex simplicity, that the separate moments of seeing, hearing, and feeling are based on the even greater misapprehension that we are no longer babies and have outgrown the state of infancy without any remaining traces, adult ghosts who no longer know how to communicate through the senses. (Our baby is rolling something in his hand, holds it up, and calls out to us.)

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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Is our baby trying to abscond? Does he want to get away from us? Or does his attempt (intention, wish) to cross the threshold by himself and reach the hallway have nothing to do with us? Casually we remember: in the beginning the baby was only with us (with you, with me) or stayed where we left him (but it wasn’t a staying, he was always at one with wherever he happened to be). Now our baby wants to get away. It costs him great effort and gives him equally great pleasure. He is struggling, has to struggle. But it has nothing to do with us, we would like to think, and we believe that and don’t believe it. And then the baby comes back to us.

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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Just as animals are strangers to us (insurmountably alien: the closer we get to them the more obvious the alienness), they are quasi intimates to the baby. The animal and the baby come from the same realm, but the baby is not an animal. We encounter the same innocent gaze, a gaze for which we are no match. We cannot look without an ulterior motive (attempting to do so just proves that it is so). But at least we are able to recognize this look in others: Our baby and the dog meeting in aimless coincidence (in front of the bakery , the baby in his stroller, the dog far from his leash), a glance, exultation, loud and silent, two noses bump against each other, dry, wet, we know each other. A small exchange (of what?), and already out of sight. (Should we call back the dog to practice with him?)

Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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Outrageous, we are sufficient unto ourselves!  Not entirely unexpectedly (or unwished-for), the reproach reaches our ears that we are depending solely on ourselves (you, me, the baby). That we want to produce greatness out of the smallness of our world. What truth about the world could possibly come from Three, when three million know so little! Do we intend to cast doubt on the security of tradition? Every thought, every experience needs a foundation in which it is anchored. Without the words of great poets and thinkers nothing can be conceived, or experienced. And so forth. Reproaches can be spun indefinitely. Then we realize: We ourselves are making them. Therefore nothing is easier than to reject them ourselves! (All this because we forgot to receive instruction with a glance at our baby. He does not believe in reproaches.)