The State of Grace

Grace Emily Page was born on January 17, 2025. Catherine and Sam’s third child. Ain’t she the cutest thing?

Our seventh grandchild, Gracie has a quality of happy serenity about her that seems rare to me. Possibly her quiet bliss is something I’m noticing more as my search for it has a greater urgency and a bit sharper focus now. Maybe she is teaching me. She is quietly content in a way that I would emulate. She has about her a “peace that passeth understanding.”

Being born we come from a place of no conditions, no unmet needs and no preferences into a world of opposites, of uncomfortable diapers and motivating hunger, of dark danger and our parents’ blessed reassurance. Our living experience exposes us to distractions through our senses and our developing minds. We must learn to understand, to form language, to achieve things from crawling to imagining. So doing we crowd out pure consciousness and fill our minds instead with thoughts, some necessary, some superfluous. We are indeed fortunate if our parents and siblings provide happy and peaceful examples of what we can be; the Page family is blessed with this ability. For some of us a return to the tranquility of the womb can be a necessary exercise.

Meditation is this return, a decision, an attempt to experience pure consciousness, without conditions or preferences, past or future. We can do this for a daily period of dedicated time by enclosing our experience and our distracting thoughts behind an imaginary door, so we may experience only our breathing, entering into and remaining in a state of Grace.

I am so grateful for this tiny girl’s example.