Miracle of Life: Owen Joshua Ayers

Owen Joshua Ayers

Well, here he is… our newest little boy, Owen Joshua Ayers.  For those of you who followed it on Twitter, you got a semi-blow-by-blow.  If not, Owen was born at 12:54 pm (EST) on Wednesday, October 21st.  It was a beautiful experience, and Kelly did an amazing job.

You know how they say that if you can suspend thought for just a moment you would allow the presence, who you really are, to seep in and it would expand and all that?  After coaching and saying, “PUSH!” about 50 times, this little guy came out and all time stoo still.  No thoughts, no mind chatter.  Just absolute brilliant joy and an overwhelming sensation of LOVE!  I wouldn’t call it enlightenment, but if that’s what enlightenment is like, then I don’t think I would be able to function.  Owen is my third child, and that feeling never dulls.  It’s so beautiful.  Thank you all for being a part of it!

A New Life

Those of you who come here often will know that we have another little one on the way.  He’s a little bigger than expected based on the last checkup, so they’ve decided it’s time for him to make his grand entrance (or exit).  It was strange setting an appointment to have a baby, but it is what it is, isn’t it?  Next Wednesday, at 5 am, we will check in the Labor & Delivery ward.  If all goes well, sometime later that day we will meet our son, Owen Joshua.

This will be my third child, and each one’s birth so far has had a profound affect on me.  I’m a closet emotional, which means I am easily brought to tears like a little girl.  I fight these emotions like you wouldn’t believe at times like these, and I honestly can’t believe I’m putting myself out there like this.  The fight ends up with very large headaches and tensed neck muscles.  I’m a man, damn it.  I’m not supposed to behave like a little sissy.  I know, I know… it’s OK to cry, right?  I do – when I’m emotionally involved with something as life changing and touching as creating a human being.  Just thinking about the births of my two children so far gets the pumps flowing.  It’s just an amazing, beautiful miracle to be a part of.  The weight of responsibility, the fear of being able to live up to the demands, wondering if I’m going to be as good an influence on their lives as I hoped I would be.  It can be overwhelming.

I love having children around me!  So full of energy and mischief.  So inquisitive and limit-pushing, and learning, and dragging dogs around by their tails.  No shame, no sense of right or wrong, no inhibitions – it’s all or nothing with little ones.  It’s beautiful to watch.  Where does it all go?  Why do we change so drastically?  When do we all become so serious and boring?  Children are life itself.  Us adults are just pretending to be alive… we know better than to act like children… we’re grown up.

My children don’t know what nonduality is.  They don’t care about some silly search.  Their heads aren’t full of knowledge yet.  They’re not done learning, so they’re still pure in that sense, although my daughter is close to being pulled into the fray with the rest of us.  The indoctrination has been going on for 11 years with her.  I don’t know at what point the transition occurs, or when you can point to it and claim it is finished, but I imagine it won’t be long now.  Then, hopefully at some point she’ll start questioning the things she’s been taught, and not just believing because somebody said so.  Or maybe she won’t question at all.  No questions, no problems, right?  Oh, how I’d love to pick a thing, a religion, and just believe.  Oh the bliss, the ignorance of it all.  Wonderful… no worries, Heaven awaits.  I used to think that my Mother was that way.  Blind belief, at least in the case of Christianity, seems to stem from the absolute fear of Hell, and being tortured eternally.  Gotta believe or else!  ”I love Jesus, I love God.  Thank you Jesus for saving my soul.”  Santa Claus!  Yes, I’m a heretic.  Pure silliness.

So a new life will be here soon.  A beautiful little creature, solely dependent on us, will begin his journey in Stockbridge, Georgia sometime on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009.  What’s to become of this special little boy?  An infinite expanse of possibility awaits, and I cherish the fact that I am blessed enough to be his Father!  With all these feelings welling up inside me, I find it very difficult to believe in nonduality.  I shouldn’t “believe” in anything except for my own experience.  Then why… why do I search?

My Reality

Every once in a while I catch myself marveling at how amazing everything around me is.  I, as well as many hundreds more where I’d worked for 14 years, have become an unfortunate statistic – one of many who currently make up the nationwide 9.4% unemployment ranks.  We were lucky because we knew it was coming for a while, and were given plenty of time to prepare.  As a result, I have been supremely blessed with being able to spend most all of my time with my family.  I love that!  Circumstances up to this point in my life had never allowed for such intense family saturation, and I never would have guessed that I’d almost feel guilty for not wanting to go back to the daily grind of a career.  It churns my stomach, actually… the thought of endless meetings, and long days, and teleconferences, and uniform policies, and silly HR matters.  Ugh!  I don’t look forward to it at all.  Alas, I’m afraid that that is what is in store for me unless I win a lottery jackpot, which isn’t at all possible because I don’t play.

I’ve been given a rare blessing in this life.  I have no job, but I have a life filled with such joy and love that a job just seems so pathetically unimportant.  It’s just too bad that I have bills to pay, and groceries to buy.  I suppose that sometime soon I’ll be negotiating a new stint as an employed dolt, and loathing that first day away from heaven.  It’s true what they say, you know… “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”  I will miss being around my family all day long, and will think of them often in my next tenure in indetured servitude.  I will, no doubt, feign pride and happiness at finally landing said gig, and maybe even pretend to look forward to contributing to something bigger than myself.  I just hope I won’t get lulled into the corporate bullshit, and become a part of the machine.

Until then, I know what I have been blessed with, and I will count those blessings every moment I’m allowed.  I have placed a number of my art pieces for sale, and that would be wonderful if that took off, but I have no such pipe dreams.  Actually, that would be absolutely fantastic.  Maybe, several years after I pass, my children and grandchildren could benefit from my artistic efforts.  Who knows.

So, this was a bit off topic for me, but I thought about oneness, nonduality, awareness, etc, and I didn’t think I could write again on the subject without regurgitating what has already been said over, and over again.  I sound like a broken record.  Nothing fresh, nothing new, no enlightenment, not even a glimpse.  I brought it back down to Earth tonight.  I’m unemployed.  I’m looking for a job that I don’t want to go back to.  I love my family, and I love spending every moment with them.  I’m tired, and I’m enjoying a nice merlot.  That’s my reality right now.  I don’t want another one, nor do I care to deeply understand the one I have at the moment.  See me tomorrow… maybe things will change again.

I Can See Where You’re Coming From… Almost

Me and "the boy" - Made with AndreaMosaic.

It’s been a couple days.  I’ve had to digest a comment conversation about my grandpa that’s kind of made me re-think this Advaita stuff – to look at it from a different perspective.  Everything I know, I know from experience.  Sure, there are things I apparently know intrinsically, such as how to breathe, how to beat my heart, how to grow my hair and fingernails, how to digest my food, how to stay alive while asleep, etc.  All these things I’d attributed to the autonomic nervous system, “I” already knew how to do without any training or external stimulus.  They just happen.  In some respects I guess I can agree with the Advaitins that life is being lived through me, for, without these automatic actions, I could not be typing these words.  I don’t breathe… breathing happens.  I don’t beat my heart… heart-beating happens.  I don’t digest food… digestion happens.  All of these things happen without my input or control.  Actually, I don’t have any control of these things whatsoever.

The tricky part has to do with the five senses and how the world around me is brought inside and experienced.  Now that I think about it, I really have little control over the sensory inputs either.  Seeing happens despite my thoughts that say I can control it.  Sure, I can close my eyes, or control where I look, but I cannot control the seeing itself.  It just happens, and I have nothing to do with it.  Same with hearing, taste, smell, and touch.  All of those senses are always there, always reporting to the brain, but not controlled in the least.  Aside from plugging my ears, how can I control what is heard?  I can’t.  There is hearing, that’s all.

That all brings me back to grandpa, and whether or not grandpa is real.  What I know of grandpa is all in memory, which is thought.  Grandpa is a thought, or a series of thoughts brought back from previous experiences, which are always only experienced now.  When I am in his physical presence, I see, hear, smell, and touch him.  That is a more direct experience of him, but still it relies on the senses to report what is sensed to a brain, which interprets all those signals, and coalesces them into a single experience of “grandpa”.  Not the real grandpa, but just an interpreted version of him.  So I guess when someone says that there is no grandpa, I technically can’t argue with them.  And honestly, I can’t verify anything other than I exist.  Everything else is a brain taking input from it’s associates… here-say.  But then again, I bet if someone were to clobber my right leg with a sledge hammer, both my legs would break, and I would scream like a little girl for a very long time.  At that moment, you couldn’t convince me in the least that what I was experiencing wasn’t real.

I guess you could say that I’m at a conceptual crossroads now.  I can understand why someone would say, “none of this is real”, and technically get away with it because there’s no concrete way of proving that any of this exists at all.  All I can say with absolute authority is that I exist.  I am, and everything else is because I am.  Sounds selfish, but if I didn’t exist, this would all be nothing.  But I still don’t quite get it!  Arghh!

Mid-week

I had a scare at home yesterday that made me think.  You know how you get wrapped up in the routine of life?  Wake up, get ready, go to work, work, go home, watch TV, eat dinner, watch TV, go to sleep, repeat.  Blah, blah, blah…  It really gets monotonous, doesn’t it?  Funny how things work sometimes to shake your reality up a bit every once in a while.  The intention from the universe, I believe, is to make you think when these things happen.  I have had my world shaken up quite a bit over the past seven years, and have always been able to look back at it all and say, “I needeed that”, and be glad for the experience.

Yesterday was another one of those.  I don’t think anything is terribly wrong, but what happened caused me to think of what my life would be like without my beautiful wife.  I take her for granted sometimes.  It’s a sin, I know, but I am so comfortable with her, and I just expect her to always be here, laughing and being full of life.  Having gone through the mental excersise of not having her around, I know what life would be like without her in it – empty.  We’ve known we were soulmates since we met.  A very deep, eternal connection.  I realized yesterday that not having her around would really disrupt the flow of life around me.  She’s amazing!

I could ramble on and on, but the point I wanted to make this morning was that the people in your lives are there for a reason, but they’re not there forever.  I know how easy it is to depend on the regularity of them always being there.  You don’t give it much thought, but the people you love the most are not here forever.  Life is fragile.  Make sure you take some time to cherish what you have while it’s happening.  Don’t always be so caught up in the past and future to ignore the present that’s always here, full of life, always giving you what you need.