This weekend has been an interesting and enlightening one for me. On Friday night, my good friend Jennifer gave birth to her second child; a baby girl named Sierra. Sabrina and I have been given the great honour of being named as Sierra’s Godparents. And while that in and of itself has given me pause for thought on more than one occasion, nothing hit home for me more than on Saturday afternoon, when Sabrina and I went to the hospital to visit Jen and her new baby. The moment I held that tiny little 5lb. 3oz. girl in my arm, I was hit with a concrete battering ram of awe and realization. Until tonight I couldn’t put into words what I felt.
Anyone who knows me, knows that I have a deep reverence for science, skepticism and logic. I am an avowed Athiest and someone who believes that the unknown is NOT the unknowable. However, when I held that little baby…nothing in my life to date has ever left me feeling so awestruck and lost for words.
So then, in a serendipitous turn of events, Sabrina and I found ourselves tonight, as we often do, watching episodes of Breaking Bad on Netflix (trying to catch up before the final season premieres). I say “serendipitous” as the episode we saw featured a poem by Walt Whitman. This poem put into words what I could not during that eye-opening moment in which I held my newborn Goddaughter in my arms.
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
