existence and being

Existence. I've never really thought about it much. Maybe in the morbid correlation with death, or in the frantic imaginings of life after death, or maybe in the blank, black void that is the product of my failed imaginings. Other than that I've not given it much thought, but then the other day I had an epiphany about it.

A few afternoons ago I was holding my beautiful little niece, she was asleep and I had her laid out on my lap so that I could watch her dreaming little face work itself through an array of different emotions. As I traced her delicate features with my eyes, touching the curve of her soft, downy cheek, the little upturn of her nose, the slant of her sleepy eyes, I began to see her differently. I saw her as a compilation of my sister and her husband. I saw the unique ratio of their features converged in beautiful unity within her little body, barely three weeks old. With startling realization, I saw her as a newly created being - a being which, in the not so distant past, did not exist but would now exist completely, even into eternity.

For a second my brain couldn't wrap aroung that. I was, as I watched this perfect baby sleep, witnessing the beginning her existence. I think for a moment, a small achingly poingnant moment, I was given a glmpse through the eyes of God. I saw my little niece's life, barely begun as it was, laid out before me: I saw her as this rosy cheeked little baby, I saw her as a spirited toddler, a precosious little girl, an enthusiastic teenager, a passionate young woman, a beautifully strong woman, a godly old woman - I saw the story of her existence stretched out to completion and it was beautiful.

I think this seems so foreign and strange to me because in my own memory I have no recolection of the beginning of my existence, in my mind there has never been a time in which I did not exist, I have always been. Yes, I've read of times when even my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did not exist but that was not my world, the world in which I frame my existence. I'm not sure if it makes sense, but I think at the core of what I'm saying is that in my mind I am a god, eternal - no beginning, no end. And yet, through my neice I saw my own mortality, linked not to the end of life as is usually done, but to the beginning of life in way that was as humbling as it was beautiful.