Grace

Grace Emily Page was born a week ago yesterday to Catherine our daughter and her husband Sam. Their third child and, one expects, considering the happiness and charm of her two siblings, Hope (age five) and Emmet (two) she will be another Page child blessed with a joyful sense of love and security.

Everything she will learn out here in the world will be a distraction from pure consciousness. “I am hungry.” “My diaper is wet.” “Where is mommy?” The stillness and purity of the womb is being replaced by reality, or what we call experience: the clutter of information, physical, mental and emotional awareness, distractions from the purity of little Grace’s true self, the self she experienced before she had to think.

One day she will sit down to meditate, maybe, to try to regain the stillness, the separation from intellectual and emotional busyness that human life invariably entails. After crayons and dolls, school and work, love and disappointment, she will once again try to find the peace and fulfillment she came out of a week ago. This is her true self, pure and perfect.