Genevieve Therese Parr Brown was born at home, Jonah House, on Sunday, May 1st at 3:50 p.m.
Auggie has handled his little sister’s homecoming with relative ease. He likes to practice his vocabulary by using her features as prompts: fingers, hands, mouth, ears, eyes and cheeks. He seems to know that Evie doesn’t replace him, but rather enlarges his life with all sorts of wonder and unexpected change!
We are grateful for community. People have showed up in so many ways: washing dishes, preparing meals, spending time with Auggie, tending to Emily, and simply sitting with us and sharing in the reverie Evie inspires.
With joy, sadness. Birth and death. Daniel Berrigan passed away. On Monday evening, two days after he’d died and less than 24 hours into Evie’s life, I reflected on some words he’d read during the Catonsville 9 trial:
“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, for the burning of paper instead of children …”
Holding Evie in my arms, I’m aware that right now other newborns are being torn apart by war, deprivation, addiction, and neglect. I cannot love her without also calling to heart and mind their suffering. Violence in the world throughout fracturing the littlest and most fragile among us. In Syria. In San Antonio, where two kids are found tied up in a back yard, tethered like dogs, leashes around their necks, with scars and scratches all over their bodies. In Baltimore, a mother punishes and ultimately kills her stepchild by boiling his legs.
As I read about and hold these horrors in my heart I experience a great grief over the cycles of suffering and violence — and our world’s addiction to violence — that permeate our shared life. I invoke a passage from the Buddha’s discourse on good will: “just as a mother with her own life protects her child, her only child, from harm, so within yourself let grow a boundless love for all creatures.” It comes to me as a challenge: Do I embrace each being, especially those I’m averse to, as I would Evie? I know I don’t.
Evie is precious. She nurses and sleeps. Her needs are simple and direct, physical and intimate.
I practice a different kind of zazen when I hold her. She quiets and invites me into her stillness. Her eyes move underneath their lids and her face, completely relaxed one moment, in another twitches, wrinkles, frowns, grins and pouts. I love watching her play of gestures.
Auggie is precious. When he’s not “up with daddy,” I chase him around the house and outside. Auggie erupts with activity and a ceaseless stream of words until, exhausted, he declares: “baff, mup” and we take him upstairs to bed. He falls asleep right away, eats when he wakes up, and again we go, nonstop, until the nightime ritual of washing, brushing, book reading and fare-welling: Bye bye toys, moon, stars, stuffed animals, mommy and daddy.
Life at Jonah House is full, in and out of doors, with the land greening and growing everywhere. The garden, the grass, the forest humming with movement. Bugs and birds. Vines climbing trees. Plants of all sorts sprouting skyward and every which way towards the light they can catch.
A few day’s ago I spotted a fox. A male, I think. He glided between the tomb stones near the house and disappeared behind a cluster of trees. I watched cats scatter because they gather there.
Dandelions can resurrect themselves over night! On the mornings after we mow, I marvel at their stalks rising upright out of the ground, inches above the cut grass, like thousands of twigs stuck there by some kind of nocturnal mischief.
Tucker Brown
All this makes me consider how birds home to a particular place. Habitats in physical space that orient their lives and journeys. Places of return and the innate sense to find them.
