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Do you think, baby? What is going on with your thoughts? Has the first one shown up yet, has it already been thought? We look at our baby with curiosity. A first thought – shouldn’t we have witnessed it already, or will we do so soon, or are we witnessing it just now? Is thinking something that develops in you? Is there a life before the first thought and then a life after? Thus we gaze at our baby, wait a little and then a little longer, and now suddenly it arises, floats into view and falls away again. A thought, we immediately think, is something very different from what we always thought.

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The greatest bliss comes about while drinking. Perhaps bliss is drinking itself. Momentarily sated, the insatiable comes to light. Gratification is merely preparing the next round. Thus pleasure (in drinking) has time to recover. There is no end to this process. Is this necessity? Probably. But like all probability, it clouds the view of what is essential. Our baby there, with the round mouth, helping himself to your breast, his breast: never is communion more visible, never is it more obvious that communion is pleasure and has no other existence than as pleasure. (And then there is that other kind of slaking – oblivion.) 

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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?).

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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.

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Das erste Jahr Babybuddha jetzt auf:

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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!

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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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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.