Second Birth
Humans experience two births: the first, where one’s body is expelled from their mother’s birth canal, and the second, where one’s head is expelled from one’s own ass.
I’m a big fan of Philip K. Dick’s science fiction, and one of the themes that he explored fairly often was private reality (idios kosmos) v. shared reality (koinos kosmos). I forget what book it was, but —paraphrasing here— he describes the difference between a baby human and a baby deer: the former is born helpless, only able to consider its own wants and desires (idios kosmos); the latter is able to run within a few hours of its birth, as if it knows its place in the order of the universe (koinos kosmos).
Eventually, most human babies eventually discover the shared reality of community, and the monumental trust in (and responsibility for) each other that has been foundational to our progress from caves to cities.
Most. Not all. And for those who have, your role now in further building our shared reality, our community, is a kind of second-birth doula.
This went out yesterday as issue 26 of The Angelo Report, a weekly newsletter published every Sunday afternoon.