The Imminence of Life

illustration by Edgar Duvivier

Olivia announced her future existence in one of the most beautiful dreams I’ve ever had. In my dream, I was in the driveway of the house where we lived, and saw a star floating in the clear, fading blue, evening sky. It was a sharp sphere of light that alone claimed all the heavenly extension around it. It was the owner, the first one, the announcer of the night. As large and precise as a tennis ball, it was a mystery I’d never imagined before, and like inaugurating an entirely new universe in which the astronomical laws we know no longer ruled, it made that whole area I was standing on, which had been so predictable until then, feel like a source of the unknown. But quickly relating the celestial body to something I could identify, I thought it could only be the Vesper star, with the silvery, fixed light of a planet, and managed to dissipate some of the fear I felt of its unknown mystery. Radiantly overwhelming and yet familiar, it should be able to communicate with me, and I said to it inside my mind,” Venus, you won’t carry me to strange grounds, and give me unsettling thoughts…

The celestial body grew some more, swelling to the size of half a soccer ball, and I was awed. It became possible to see on it virgin forests, rivers and continents on the sea, all with American names. Still untouched in the sky, my unstained heavenly being was ready to be populated by humans, to be walked on and become a new world. Such pristine perfection lending itself to it gave me an indescribable wish to cry. As I looked at it floating in the sky with the sadness of being lonely and the euphoria of being whole, I was before the imminence of life. Little star, why are you letting go of your perfection to become soil and earth to be cultivated, instead of continuing to be a jewel on your own? Why do you abandon your single, immaculate majesty in the sky, to become ground and life for others? Why do you let go of your perfection by making your heavenly purity available to human exploration?

Stars are born as isolated units in their plenitude, and sharing in their light. Their quality of first principle, their unending novelty, makes for the ever new beauty of a starry sky’s inscrutable secret.

The imminence of life is awe of its mystery and joy of its miracle. It is reverence before the immaculate, and the ambivalence of freedom, distancing from God to become the owner of a destiny.

That sacred sphere, ready to share itself, was the wonder of integrity and the suffering of diversification. It was the conception of a baby.

The imminence of life; a tremendous faith from the creature, and an enormous generosity from the Creator. All pure beauty, with its sadness, its awesome purity, its never ending generosity. Creator and creature surrender themselves and split from each other to really come to love one another. The imminence of life is the gesture of God before life, the hand depicted by Michelangelo in the mercifulness of letting go and the sadness of separating; the melancholy of inaugurating distance in the greatness of hinting the return. It is the hand we carry in the depths of our heart, from when we decided to become the little star of my dream; a potential light to be shared with others, a seed inside our mother’s womb. A new sparkle in the sky.