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There we are on December 23rd, our last night out before junior decided to make his grand entrance. The setting is the van Dusen Gardens Festival of Lights, a lovely and brilliant annual display of over 1 1/2 million bulbs. It's the strangest thing looking back at this picture. We had no idea that not a half hour later Lis's water would be breaking and we'd be in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.

The idea of having a special mythology surrounding your birth (and other life events) is both comforting and even potentially inspiring. I'm happy that John will always be able to hear about how he was surrounded by lights when he decided to start making his way into the world. We can visit the Festival each year and tell him the story of the night he was born, how we were there oohing and awing and how he must have just wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Already, every time we drive by the gardens they've taken on this almost mystical quality in our minds.

It's nice, too, that he'll be able to look back at the photos of the night he was born, and see two very happy and in love parents. In a strange collusion of serendipity and grace, we managed to get a thoroughly documented picture of the evening and our quest into the wee hours of the morning when he was born (4:20am to be exact). One of the coolest little things that happened actually had to do with our camera settings. Because we were shooting at night when we were at the gardens, the photos were set to take in maximum light. There's this long series of colorfully lit bulbs surrounded by darkness, and then all of the sudden there is a single shot of Lis lying in the hospital bed, surrounded by whiteness, looking positively luminescent.

I'd like to think that the universe was strictly conspiring on our behalf that night, but either way, we can always seize the experience and claim it for ourselves through the joy of self-narration. Maybe that's the way it always works, but it can also be nice to let go and imagine that our own local lives can intersect with grander, more mind-boggling machinations of the world at large. In the retelling, the connection seems more and more plausible, and from a sense of connection, the world can take on the aspect of a more welcoming and, dare I say it, miraculous place.




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