Oh, I almost forgot to tell you—we’ve had a child. A Mexican, born in Chiapas. We are now parents to a Mexican child.

The moment of birth was deeply moving. Just before our child emerged, the area around the vaginal opening rose like a volcano ready to erupt. The next instant, the baby burst forth from a blood-streaked fissure, accompanied by a torrent of amniotic fluid. It was, indeed, an eruption. The analogy of the body to the earth is universal, but seeing it made us truly understand.

Parenting is tough but full of lessons. For instance, we’ve noticed something about babies: they cry for reasons we can’t always understand—hunger, discomfort, tiredness, or who knows what. In such moments, we pick them up, rock them, sing to them, and dance. And when that fails, we offer milk.

For a while, this was our daily life. And then it struck us: isn’t this exactly what we’ve always done in festivals and rituals? Singing, dancing, carrying, offering—it’s all there. These are universal acts of prayer.

That’s when we realized: we’ve always been trying to lull the world. To soothe it, begging it to stop crying, to be calm, if only for a moment. Doesn’t that make this world seem strangely comical and fascinating?