As this difficult year comes to a close, we can only hope for better tomorrows as the calendar page turns for the final time in 2020. If we pause long enough to reflect, we find hope in history of overcoming hardships and creating better days. This poem by Howard Thurman, an American author, philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader, invites us to look to the “growing edge”. And in the birth world, there are so many beautiful metaphors for the growing edge: the joining of the sperm and egg to create new life, the surprise of previously unknown abounding love a baby brings to a family, the actualization of the power of woman to birth.

May you and yours experience the growing edge in the new year and may we enter days of good health and healing, equality and justice, balance in all things.

The Growing Edge

All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born; all around us life is dying and life is being born. The fruit ripens on the tree, the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new lives, fresh blossoms, green fruit. Such is the growing edge! It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung, the one more thing to try when all else has failed, the upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavor. This is the basis of hope in moments of despair, the incentive to carry on when times are out of joint and men have lost their reason, the source of confidence when worlds crash and dreams whiten into ash. The birth of a child — life’s most dramatic answer to death — this is the growing edge incarnate. Look well to the growing edge!
—Howard Thurman