Unlike many of my surgical colleagues I was not squeezed slowly and bloodily through the screaming walls of a birth canal on my entry into the terrestrial phase of life.

Rather, my first earthly touch was the tickle of a knife stabbed at my scalp to free me from the warm wetness of my longest bath.

Flanked by one resident retracting bowel and another pulling down on bladder, the surgeon lifted me from my mother’s numbed belly into the whiteness of the OR’s sterility and light.

I suppose I never did need a baptism, given that my first moments were in a room so clean,

and three decades later, like a devoted pilgrim, I make my return to that whitest place, where I swath myself in the purest gowns, slice through the fibers of life and reach my hands deeply into unseen cavities like those from whence I came.

In touching, I feel the animal warmth of a billion churning cells. In cutting, I know that we are more parts than we are whole, reminding that so much of a person can be discarded buried and replaced before that most striking End.

In that room, my longing hands try to resonate consciously with

that most natural and relentless Flow.