"Our first experience, remarkably enough, is that of loss. A moment before, we were everything, undifferentiated, indivisibly part of some kind of being - only to be pressed into birth. Henceforth a tiny residue of the whole must strive to avoid contracting into even less and less, must stand up to a world which rises before it with ever-increasing substantiality, a world into which it has fallen, from universal fullness, as into a deprivating void."
I have mixed feelings about this paragraph. On the one hand, I agree. On the other, I have always thought of death, as a birth, an emergence into a wider, more exciting, open, all-encompassing world. Also, we now know how aware children are as they are carried in the womb. They are already part of what is outside. Many children are not nourished by the mother in the womb. They have not known a safe place. Some children were not wanted. They feel that rejection their whole life. I have seen that over and over in Rosen. So, why do I place this paragraph here? Because I think it is important for each of us to look at what loss means to us. How else do we deal with attachment and non-attachment? How else do we happily toss the ropes to shore when we go?
