Mobile

Yesterday was dark and stormy. After a wake/fuss/wake/fuss night you slept until 8am. So did Daddy and I. None of us were quick about anything. Groggy showers, groggy Luxy-feeding, groggy coffee making, groggy cereal eating. I groggily wiped dried snot crust from below your nostrils and groggily set you down in the middle of the living room rug.

And then you started crawling. And Daddy and I were not nearly no groggy anymore.

You are now officially mobile. And today, you truly figured that out. Yesterday you learned the physical motion, but today your face showed knowledge of the new autonomy. You are capable of moving from one place to another: from the table legs to the dog's water bowl, from the comfort of my lap to the rigidity of the kitchen floor, from the foot of the stairs to the ottoman's edge. You are migratory.

Ironically, unlike linear, path-oriented you, a mobile (the noun, not the adjective) is capable of moving on only elliptical paths, around not toward. In this way, the earth is mobile and Mars is mobile and the moons of Jupiter are mobile. You go to sleep under a mobile. A yellow lion, a brown bear, a tan and white striped zebra, a blue elephant: these creatures revolve around a stuffed replica of Noah's Ark. And the revolving is meant to soothe. A mobile's motion is predictable--your motions are not.

And I can't help thinking today, at this point in time, of the other Mobil. The gas corporation. And though it's not their oil, not their fault, I can't help thinking of the millions and millions of gallons of oil that are leaking into the ocean at this very moment. That motion, that movement, is not linear or circular. I imagine the oil's motion as the rhythmic shoving of the waves or outward rippling of a drop of blood fallen into a warm bath. Dispersing, digressing.

I am so proud of your new mobility, Thiz. I have taken approximately 23 videos of you crawling in the last 48 hours. Thisbe to duck, Thisbe to dog bowl, Thisbe to ice cream container, etc. I announced your new development to my friends, to my classes, to the Facebook universe. And yet, in watching this new motion rise out of you, I am already longing for stillness. For you, for me, for the world. I hope that I don't push you forward too much, too fast, too hard. I pray that I honor your need to pause--to watch the afternoon light play on the silver Mylar balloon, to lick the leaking snot from your upper lip, to pick at the dog hairs in the carpet. I hope that in our effort to teach you motion, we do not forget to teach you how to honor its absence--I hope that you learn stillness of mind and body and heart.