Turning again.

I'm writing this post on a hot Saturday afternoon, with the knowledge sitting behind every word that at any minute my baby could wake up and need me to stop writing and come to him. These are a few snuck moments at the end of his nap, on a day when I said "I will write a post this morning" as soon as I got out of bed. But here it is 2:30 and I'm just getting around to it.

Time is funny, and all of life is some kind of cycle. The biggest, most langorous of course is the life cycle, the one that Isaac is just now embarking on. A slow, slow turning. We barely feel the spin, it's as ponderous as the earth on its axis.

Then there are other, smaller but still large cycles. The year and the seasons. Here in Thailand, we don't have seasons like I grew up with. In Canada the seasons are the type that justify snowflakes on Christmas decorations, and it was only when I came to Asia that I realized that so much of the world looks at a snowflake as a pretty decoration, but perhaps has never had their nostrils freeze over because of the cold, or that intense ache of thawing fingers, crying and running them under the tap. (Was it only me who cried over that? I was a rather dramatic kid.)

Still, we have seasons in Northern Thailand. We have the cold season, which never reaches freezing, and the hot season, which is also called fire season because the fields are filled with the flames of farmers using their traditional field preparation, and the forests are burned to allow the hunters to find animals to hunt. And then we have the rainy season. A cycle of three, turning on itself again and again. It repeats so consistently that people are nervous when rain comes in the cool season. "The world is changing," one taxi driver told me, in the middle of an unseasonal storm.

In Newborn Land, I have to again get used to the shortest kind of cycles. Isaac and I do the same things again and again all day and night long, in short, rapid sessions without a lot of space between. He wakes up, I nurse him, he uses his pot (we do EC, or diaper free), we talk to each other, I give my mom some Isaac time, and it's time for him to sleep again. Sometimes he spits up, or we introduce a new concept, like bathtime. But this is the way it turns for us, again and again and again.

With my first child, I was very impatient with these short cycles. I was used to full afternoons of painting, to sitting and mulling over my coffee like an old man on a red padded seat in a diner. I squirmed against the coils of my new life even while I tried to understand it. Of course, by the time I had YaYa, I knew that this cycle of eating and sleeping gradually loosens into a long, curly tendril and I would get hours that had more space in them again. I began to enjoy the short cycles, the way my baby and I met up, as if for a date, again and again. "Well, hello there," I say. "There you are, beautiful. I've missed you, while you were asleep."

We meet and it's passionate and needy and I feed my child, I have fed my children and I have kissed every inch of their faces, if only for a short while. 

These cycles are not like a life cycle, or the slow turning of the earth. It's more like the wheel of a bicycle spinning through a tree-lined neighborhood, the sun glinting off its spokes. We ride quickly and the wind on our faces is like the gentlest touch, it's full of the scent of flowers.