Birth, a heart split in two, and threads of fate and destiny.
TRANSCRIPT
My birthday occurred this week, and while I’ve never been big on announcing my birthday, since the topic for today’s episode centers on the image of birth, it only seems right to acknowledge the anniversary of my own birth. Every birth, of course, comes with a story - a story that, arguably, belongs primarily to the mother (the person birthing). That story, perhaps, gets mingled with the accounts of others who may have been present at the birth, and it eventually trickles down to those of us who were born on the day in question… for us to own in our own way.
As for the story of my birth, my mother recalls it with vim, as well as some tempered disappointment. Having planned for a natural birth with a nurse-midwife, a slow and difficult labor led to her peace birthing room being filled with modern medical equipment, and through a progression of various interventions, I was eventually delivered by c-section. Given the slow progress of the labor, and my size - a full pound heavier than what is conventionally diagnosable as “much larger than average” - it is quite possible that I am to be counted among the quarter of babies delivered by c-sections considered medically necessary. Perhaps the procedure was even life-saving. My mother will tell you that she is forever grateful for the results of that experience - in other words, me, her son - and still, there seems to be a slight hue of sadness that pokes through in the telling every so often; and so I, too, have carried with me a bit of brokenheartedness around the story.
While the birth stories we are told by our parents and caregivers are an intriguing aspect of the personal mythology we carry with us throughout life, I actually seek today to evoke a different sense of the Birth Story; and to do so, I will need to draw on two old myths from ancient Greece. The first of these is the Myth of Er, the story of the soul’s experiences in the Other World, occuring after death and before rebirth. The story says that, as the soul awaits reincarnation, it observes the dramas unfolding on Earth around each child nearing birth; and feeling compelled by a given set of circumstances, the soul makes a sacred agreement to inhabit a given life. It is important to note that, when this sacred agreement is made, the soul is aware of the all the limitation and wounding inherent to the circumstances of the chosen life; it is also important to note that the soul is aware of the gifts it can bring to those circumstances - the way it may serve as a blessing in the world.
Just before the soul is born into the physical world, it is required to pass through the River Lethe - the waters of forgetfulness - so that all the agreements just made are forgotten. However, it is also at that time that the soul is joined by its daimon, the companion spirit that does not forget but rather knows the agreements made by the soul and whose job it is to remind the soul of those agreement and point the individual towards their destiny - one step at a time - throughout their life. So when it comes to the myth of Er, the story of our birth is less the story of how we came into the world and more the story we brought into the world. In fact, I like to think of the daimon as an inner author - the personal authority who, assuming office within our heart and holding counsel with our soul, is whispering to us the secret, sacred storyline threaded through each moment we experience, each decision we make, and each and every breath we draw into our lungs.
And that brings me to the thing that actually served as the inspiration for this episode, which is the biological reality of an infant’s first breath. During a chat in which I was sharing my thoughts about the Greek myth of the Sisters of Fate (which we will look at in a moment), my wife told me about an episode of the Radiolab podcast that describes this miraculous moment; and listening to the episode, I learned how is it that we transition from having our blood oxygenated via our mother’s breathing to then breathing on our own.
During our time in the waters of the womb, when our lungs have not yet begun to function, it is actually a hole in our heart that keeps us alive. Between the two atria of the heart that, after birth, are totally separate from one another, in the unborn child there is something like a trapdoor that allows oxygen-rich blood being received from the mother to flow from one side of the heart to the other, bypassing our still latent lungs. What we, as air-breathing beings, would consider to be a disastrous deformity (this opening between the atria), the unborn infant, without it, would simply cease to live. It is in the moment after birth, when we feel the cold of the air on our soggy skin, that our lungs come to life, catalyzing the long-awaited wail of the child and signaling to the heart that it is time to close that trapdoor forever.
With that image in mind, I’ll say a few words now about the Sisters of Fate, the Greek myth that reminded my wife of the wondrous story of breath after birth. The three Sisters of Fate are depicted as spinners and weavers. They are the ones who generate the threads of fate and destiny that run through our lives; the ones who weave them into the tapestries that represent all of our experiences in this world; and the ones who - when the time has finally come - cut the thread of life, bringing our time on Earth to an end. It is from this myth that we derive the expression “hanging by a thread” that we use when the health of something or someone has come to be in a tenuous place.
The myth of the moirai (the Greek name for the sisters) is also where we get the expression, “a twist of fate.” The common use of this expression is, of course, to say that, while something happened that was unexpected (or even unfortunate), it seems to have been fated, written, or even agreed upon. When I think of the word twist, of course, I think of a thread or a cord that is made by twisting various fibers or smaller cords together. The word twist is related to the word twin, evoking the image of a cord made of twisting two threads together, like the two sacred agreements of the soul or the two twisting bands of nucleotides found in the double helix of our DNA.
Another old meaning of the word twist suggests a sense of dividing something into two. This makes me think about the heart, which was open - was whole a sense - when the child was in the womb; but it quickly divided into two shortly after birth. When I recall the way the scientist on the Radiolab podcast described the trapdoor in the newborn's heart as being “sewn closed”, I can’t help but imagine the thread of the moirai stitching the heart into its two separated sides. It seems that, as humans, we are fated to live with a heart divided… and so later in life, when we say that our heart has been broken - by a lover, or a missed opportunity, or a birth that did not unfold the way we have hoped - we might see the mythic connection between our broken heart, our physical heart that has been split into two since the moment we are born, and our separation from the Life Story that we have forgotten. Perhaps, in that way, the breaking of our heart actually brings us closer to our Story.
But, of course, this is where the daimon enters. Interestingly enough, this guardian spirit described in the myth of Er is often referred to as the soul’s “twin”, and we might imagine that - like the other twisted threads made of two separate strands - the existence of the soul and the daimon are inherently wound around one another. In the realm of myth, the flowing forth of the waters of birth is akin to the newborn emerging from the waters of forgetfulness, coming into this world with what would seem like a “blank slate”... except for the presence of the daimon, the guiding spirit. When the unforgiving temperature of the air-breathing world meets with the skin of the newborn, the lungs open and breath enters. Breath: the word which, in so many languages, is the same as the word for spirit. So we might say that, upon that first breath being taken, Spirit - the daimon - enters the body of the child. And from that point forward, our blood - which once flowed directly from one side of the heart to the other - must now pass through the lungs, wherein it is endowed by Spirit… or we might simply say the power of our uniquely human imagination… our blood is endowed with life and vitality that then spreads throughout our entire being.
And so my conclusion is this: that first breath is a prophecy. Myth would tell us that the story of how we are born is merely a fragment of the story with which we are born, and when we take our first breath we are thereafter inhabited by our own personal storyteller, whispering our soul’s secret, sacred agreements to the very cells within our blood.
Personally speaking, I’ve found that living with a sense of prophecy offers a whole new lens on life - a way of seeing that recognizes the interwoven nature of fate and destiny, and in doing so can quite literally transform the experience of life: resistance of what is becomes embrace; regret or resentment towards the past is replaced by a curiosity about my origins; and uncertainty or anxiety about the future is transmuted into enthusiasm and a sense of possibility. The doorway into the realm of prophecy is none other than our own imagination, and stepping through that doorway can be as simple as taking a single breath.
NOTES
Radiolab Episode on breath: https://radiolab.org/podcast/breath
Produced with deep gratitude to Michael Meade, from whose work I've learned much of what I know about the myth of Er and the Moirai: https://www.mosaicvoices.org/