Quickening

Feeling the baby moving in the womb is called "quickening," and the 27th week is the point at which many women start to feel their babies moving. Monica has "officially" felt Peanut moving since Christmas, or since about 23 weeks (go Peanut!), but his movement has continued to blossom. Even I have been feeling him moving. (See previous posts, esp. Bending it in the Belly!) Last night I could feel him kicking me in the small of my back.
Quicken. I love this word. Quicken. Webster explains, quick-en \'kwi-ken\ vb 1 a: to make alive: REVIVE b : to cause to be enlivened : STIMULATE 2 archaic a : KINDLE b : to cause to burn intensely 3 : to make more rapid : HASTEN, ACCELERATE (~ed his steps) 4 a : to make (a curve) sharper b : to make (a slope) steeper ~ vi 1 : to quicken something 2 : to come to life; esp : to enter into a phase of active growth and development (seeds ~ing in the soil) 3 : to reach the stage of gestation at which fetal motion is felt 4 : to shine more brightly (watched the dawn ~ing in the east) 5 : to become more rapid (her pulse ~ened at the sight)
The story of humanity being sculpted in clay in Chapter 2 of the Book of Genesis fascinates me--for the profound creative spirit it espouses, and because of the magical quickening that takes place in the story: Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. Something similar occurs in the Jewish legends of the golem. In these stories we hear something about how profoundly earthly we all are, sculpted of the very earth and its physical nature; then, the breath of life, a wind, quickens the earth and brings to us soul, spirit. We come to life. Neither the earthly body nor the spirited wind is human by itself, but together they contain the life. There is something profoundly earthly about all babies, and this little one for whom we wait, formed of carbon-based cells, proteins, nucleic acids, enzymes, and carbohydrates. The cells grow and divide, grow and divide, until some point. And then this quickening occurs. A breath conveys life--soul, spirit, whatever you want to call it--to each of us. My dad sometimes talks about how he and his brother, Paul Michael, shared a room as children. Dad became aware then of a habit of his because Paul could hear it: he rubs his feet together in bed. I do this too. I don't know when I started it, or if I have always rubbed them together. I just know that I rub my feet together in bed, for warmth, for the sound of skin, and because I like the feeling of no socks. I don't know. I have begun to wonder if it is somehow wrapped up in some obscure piece of genetic code somewhere in the labyrinth of our DNA...and then I wonder if it's also in Peanut's, if in his quickening inside of Monica, if in his movements becoming more rapid, he is rubbing his little tiny feet together. In this, his own beautiful quickening, he kindles in me a strange and wonderous curiosity. Such beauty.