matt...
i love my bellybutton
It’s nothing special. Everybody has one. In fact, every placental mammal has one. It’s nothing special…really nothing more than a scar.
But it’s a scar that everybody shares. Like all scars, it’s a reminder. It reminds us that no matter what we do, no matter where we go, no matter what happens to us, we were once a part of somebody else. Another person fed us, another person breathed for us, another person nourished our life.
Our navels are at the center of our lives. That’s not just a figure of speech. The location of the navel is surprisingly consistent in humans; it’s always located at the level between the third and fourth lumbar vertabrae. It’s no accident that the navel is directly in the center of da Vinci’s famous drawing of the Vitruvian Man. So it should be no surprise that when we want to center ourselves spiritually we engage in omphaloskepsis…navel gazing.
It’s nothing special, and yet it’s at the center of our existence. It’s nothing special, and yet it’s a miracle. When this child casually touches her bellybutton, she’s touching the center of the entire world. When she touches her bellybutton it is both a prayer and the answer to the prayer.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
