I’m sitting in a motorway services sipping a coffee—my mind taken up with where I’ve been and where I’m going—when I’m suddenly captivated by a family group sitting a little way in front of me.

Specifically, by the baby who is bouncing up and down gleefully, laughing and grinning and happy, on his mother’s knee. She hold him upright in a standing position so he can flex his legs and discover what they can do.

In this moment, both for mother and baby, there’s nothing else. They’re totally absorbed in what’s happening between them, and the sheer joy and fun of it.

The loving bond is tangible; I can feel it even at a distance.

I can also see something else, and it is quite magical. It’s this:

This baby doesn’t yet know that he’s separate.

For this baby, his mother is a part of him and he is a part of her; they are one and the same being.

You can see this by the way he interacts with her. He treats her body as if it’s an extension of his, when she laughs he clearly experiences it as if it’s him laughing; he knows they are in complete unison.

There is as yet no “other.”

As I watch this baby, I realize that he’s barely here yet. He’s only very newly arrived in this big earth playground. He’s wide eyed and full of the energy from which he’s recently come. In his perception of the world, he’s still barely physical.

He still knows he’s source energy; he still remembers.

He’s pure light energy, still shimmering and settling into his body, still in touch with the heartbeat from which he’s come. He ‘s full of the freedom to be. He as yet knows no other way other than to be fully and gloriously himself.

He is also a very powerful creator, who manifests exactly what he wants with ease. He wants something to happen, he puts it out there, and he experiences instant manifestation. He never doubts for a moment that what he’s wanting, through feeling and imagining, will come to him.

And so it does. He’s insistent, confident and clear, and knows that he’s worthy.

It’s that quality in babies we so enjoy about babies, isn’t it? It’s part of what makes them so loveable.

This baby is still free to be the unconditional love that he actually is.

What you see, when you look into his face, and when you watch with delight as he embraces fully the experience he’s currently caught up in, is his true nature. He is real in ways that we have ceased to know how to be real. He has not yet learned to be any other way.

It’s clear, watching, that this world he has recently jumped into is fascinating and exciting and that he’s unashamedly curious and unapologetically open and honest in his experiencing of it. He’s still anticipating life as the great adventure that he set out upon when he decided to come. He still perceives abundance surrounding him.

However, it’s the recognition that he doesn’t yet know that he is physically separate from everything else around him that catches me. The fact that, as yet, there is no me and not-me. It all just is.

And I feel a sudden pang of deep emotion, which is a mixture of joy for the sense of connection with all that is which he still retains, and a sense of the loss of this he is going to experience as he immerses himself more completely in the life experiences which lay ahead of him.

I know he’s chosen this, and I know that he’s going to be fine. But just momentarily I grieve for the loss, and almost in the same moment I recognize that it is my own grief at this loss that I ‘m feeling, and my own profound recognition of the oneness that he and I, seemingly total strangers randomly finding ourselves in the same place and at the same time, share.

This is so true of babies, isn’t it? The way they can make us catch ourselves and fill up with emotion, bring tears to our eyes and joy to our hearts as nothing else can. It’s part of the reason we all love them: they melt our hearts.

And those last few words hold the real secret about babies. They melt our hearts – a strange expression, makes it sounds like our hearts need to be unfrozen, as if they need to be softened again.

What’s that about? What is it that babies do to us? For us?

I reckon that in the eyes of a baby we see a reminder of who we know ourselves to actually be. We see our own eternal beauty and radiance and zest and loveliness reflected there. We see our actual face. We see who we were when we first came, just like this baby. We see who we really are, without all the clutter and complication of this strange reality. Without all the effort. We see beyond, and we remember.

Our heart opens wide once more, and we feel the stirring of all we really are but have learned to put away.

When we look into the eyes of this newly arrived little being, we see who you really are. We see the beauty of Source in this little newly arrived being, wide open and free, ready to love and eager for adventures, fearless and curious and all joined up, not yet defended or guarded, living from the heart because the head hasn’t got in the way yet.

We realize, in a fluttering, fleeting moment of recognition which we can hardly express, that this little being is all of us. It is pure consciousness, pure awareness, pure Love. Pure Source energy already expanding, connecting, and living fully in the moment. Moment by moment.

And loving, putting no barriers in the way of love.

Love is our original energy. It is our natural state. It is what connects us, and what we are.

When we remember this, just like the baby we once were, we remember that we already are completely loveable and loved, because love can be nothing else, and that we already do know, if only we will allow it, how to unconditionally love.

We never really fully forget.

I wish you joyous remembering!

Author: Janny Juddly

Editor: Renée Picard

Image: jlhopgood at Flickr