Wheeling Gull Isle and i will love you until my last breath and beyond

Whee cameo!

Life is a series of births.  For a time, we exist in the world we know, all the while fearing what awaits us in the next.  In the beginning, we know only darkness and silence, the warm liquid cradle of our dams' bellies.  Were conscious awareness granted to us in utero, would we fear what lay on the other side the same way that we fear death?  For one could venture that death and birth are different names for the same thing -- an emergence into another plane of existence equally as unknown to us now as this world is to the unborn infant.  Certainly, we spend enough of our lives dwelling upon the inevitability of death -- but on the other side of the veil that separates this world from the next, do they think of us as babies to come?  Do they anticipate our arrival with the same excitement and hope that we do our own children?

Consciousness had kindled in him long before his emergence into the light, and for a time, all was warm and calm.  Peaceful.  He slept in nothingness, a suspended animation of simply being, occasionally being rocked and soothed by the motion of the one who carried him.  Her heartbeat was the steady rhythm by which his body and mind came together, a soundtrack to the rising of the life force within.  Soon, though, it was time for that great crossing from this world to the next.  The darkness closed in around him, a great crushing force descending unto him until his consciousness blinked out and he faded away...

...he was awakened by the gentle wiping of a warm, soft tongue cleaning away fluid and debris from his tiny body.  What had been a pinprick of cognizance before now flared up into a vibrant candleflame of awareness as nerves began to fire and deep breaths inflated his lungs with cold, pure air.  The hard, rough ground underneath him was unpleasant, and the chill in the air was distressing.  What few memories he'd kept from his previous existence were swept away in this sudden barrage of sensory information, but he did not cry out or mewl in protest.  He struggled and flailed about beneath the ministrations of his mother, and within moments, warm softness cushioned him as he was pressed to her side and made to nurse.  He was unaware of the still, somber form of the littermate nearby; not all who left one world found their way into the next.