We begin with a scream — not of pain, but of rupture. Birth is not liberation; it is loss. It is the moment the whole becomes two.
The first breath is not liberation; it is loss. It is the moment the whole becomes two. Before that, there was no "you" and "her." There was only pulse — the vast, quiet ocean of amniotic dark, a silence filled with heartbeat. No questions, no answers. Just rhythm.
The womb is our first cosmos — circular, complete, and without gravity. Within it, time does not yet exist. Birth is the explosion that breaks that symmetry. It is our personal Big Bang — a blinding, irreversible expansion into separateness. The universe tore itself apart to make galaxies; we tore ourselves from the mother to make a self. And from that moment on, we are never whole again.
We emerge from warmth into cold, from fluid continuity into the tyranny of skin. The cord that fed us becomes a scar — the navel, a small punctuation mark left by the cosmos to remind us we were once attached to something infinite.
Perhaps this is why all human cultures dream of return. Every religion promises reunion: moksha, nirvana, heaven — all metaphors for the womb. Every love story is a disguised longing for that first oneness, to be held again without the anxiety of edges. We build homes, nations, and gods from the same desire — to belong again to something that will not leave.
Long before the word "God" enters a child's vocabulary, "Mother" is already divine. Her gaze is the first mirror through which the child glimpses existence. When she smiles, the universe feels safe. When she turns away, the universe collapses. To the infant, mother and self are indistinguishable — until the first moment of absence.
That absence gives birth to awareness. The child learns the difference between me and not-me. From that first cognitive cut arise the architectures of identity: longing, fear, attachment. Every absence thereafter repeats that first one. Every heartbreak is her departure reenacted. Every attachment, an attempt to bring her back.
Touch your navel. That small hollow is not decoration; it is scripture. It says: you were once attached to something greater than yourself. Every human carries this mark — the signature of belonging and the seal of loss.
Perhaps that whisper beneath all our striving — the urge to love, to create, to pray — is not ambition but nostalgia. We are trying to bridge what was never truly broken.
From Fragments of Being · Part I — Astitva Press