without words

i keep thinking about the experience of being without words - but so full of emotions.

is it saying something about me?
is it saying something about the moment?
is it someone else saying something to me?
is it the moment saying something to me?
is it something familiar?
is it something unfamiliar?
is it one of these things or maybe a couple?
is it possibly all of these things?

i remember toward the end of the book of job, he covers his mouth after spending time offering up question after question. when God shows up job speaks of 'things too wonderful for me to know.' he will be quiet and listen because he has seen and felt, and it brings humility.

as i held my new grandson max in my arms the words began to disappear, my vocabulary thinned out, my syntax vanished, adjectives felt impotent, participles dangled and everything fell into a space too full to understand. the one word i am hanging on with white-knuckles is the word 'humility.'

i don't know of everything that was happening emotionally as i held him, yet at the same time it seems recognizable. i know this...but in a different way. yet even if i could see the shape of things partially, or run my hand along the contoured edge of something, or make out what is focused and unfocused at the same time...i don't know if it can be said in words - even if it seems somehow familiar but also very different, at the same time.

what is the relationship of humility and paradox?
what is the relationship between grandson and grandpa?

i remember holding my own children - it was the first time i had held a baby. there was a part of me that wanted to reserve that space, those moments...so i actually tried not to hold other babies. that sounds odd but it is true. it is a strange preference or unusual conviction to reserve the actual physical space for my own children that mirrored something in my heart - just for them.

now i remember holding my grandchild, a boy named max.
now i anticipate holding my next grandchild who is arriving in september.

now i am struggling with the words as a imagine giving them a space in my arms and in my life...a space reserved just for them that no one else can have.

it seems to be a glorious, magnanimous, undoing in the heart that falls back into itself with such intensity and force and joy...it is all those things and more, more joy than my heart or my arms can hold.