Oh, Baby!

Out for a walk on Easter, I met a young woman holding a very cute baby. The mother seemed tired, and the baby wasn't that cheerful, either, although I surmised she (the baby) had perhaps recently awakened from a nap. The mom told me she also had an 8- and 5-year-old, though this child was more difficult for her, because she was raising her alone. The little girl was only four months old, so I thought, either her partner didn't plan on a kid, or, as seems to happen often in these extraordinary times, the couple came together just long enough to combine their DNA, because this little Light was needed on Earth.

As her mother and I were conversing, and after I mentioned the baby's subdued demeanor, she looked at me in the way babies do: staring, never breaking eye contact.

And then she began to laugh.

Huge, rollicking, endless laughter emanated from this tiny bundle. I stood transfixed, feeling my mouth curving irresistibly into a smile and then into my own laughter ~ it is contagious, after all!

Her mother said, "She likes your soul," and I appraised the mom as clearly a conscious being, equipped to raise a Light such as the one she held, and I said as much.

I felt blessed, renewed, in some way redeemed, by this infant's unquenchable laughter. I was in the rapt presence of a baby Buddha, and received her sustenance as manna. What an amazing gift on a day of rising: Yeaster, a rite of passage. It is a benediction I share with you through our cyber connection. May you receive the pure holy joy of laughter in your life when you least (or yeast) expect it, and may it renew you in every cell.

As I walked away, I offered the baby's mother, "May you have an easy raising." I didn't even realize the full significance until this morning.