I am currently in the middle of reading Rudolf Steiner’s book Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path [link][pdf] and laughing now at how much my 17 year old self was primed for this.  Didn’t read it until I was twice that age.  I’ll put a couple related passages from the book at the end of this post.

You and I had a discussion a while back about faith. I ended the discussion without giving you a rational reason why I am uncomfortable with faith. To begin, I feel that now, as a teenager, it is appropriate for me to explore different systems of thought and discover what has meaning for me. A specific faith is inessential to me, and might impede my intellectual development. I do not know what the case is for others. Some people are sustained by faith through difficult times and to the extent that this appears to be a basic human need I recognize it in myself. When I am in need of faith, I place it in my ability to handle difficulties or in the support of my network of family, friends and community. But, although I make use of faith, I question it. My greatest fear is of being controlled by something else. I believe very strongly in the rights and responsibilities of the individual. In practicing a faith, I see too many people ignoring the tasks of self-examination and thinking. I see religion as an attempt to simplify life, explain mysteries and form a framework for a community. However unsatisfying it may be, I prefer a complex and uncertain view of life.

I label myself an atheist, but I dislike the amoral connotations of the word, and the implication that I deny the existence of God. I do not accept His existence (theist), deny it (atheist) or question it (agnostic). It is not very important to me to believe that He does or doesn’t exist. Some people with views similar to mine have chosen to call themselves satanists, and to worship individuality, autonomy, free will, inspiration and knowledge: the gifts of the light-bearer and rebel, Lucifer and the knowledge-bearer, the serpent of the garden of Eden. I dislike this term as well, again for its amoral connotations, because it validates the Christian mythology, and because the very choice of the term is rebellious and provoking. People will call me pagan when they see my awe before Nature — but that term does not fit me either. I profess that I do not like ritual, but I do not know how true that is. My conscious mind objects to ritual on the basis that it is easily possible to lose some of the “true meaning” of a concept by ritualizing it. However, something in my subconscious mind is satisfied by ritual. Perhaps ritual makes difficult topics comprehensible and meaningful to us, or in other situations opens us up to discover deeper meanings. I never asked for life to be comprehensible or simple, and grasping the mystery of the universe will not help me through the next day or decade.

From a scientific point of view, I believe in my own insignificance as one of billions of sentient beings that have ever existed, I believe in the insignificance of my sun and solar system as one of billions of solar systems that have ever existed. If my family were killed tomorrow, or the earth were eradicated by nuclear war, or the universe began collapsing, it would not matter to me from a philosophical perspective. Emotionally, these events would upset me, as I’ve assigned emotional values to certain things. Philosophically I’ve assigned no meaning or value to anything. Yet I choose, emotionally, to love, to care about existence, and to function in society with a self-designed code of morals.

Maybe I discovered early in life that “behaving” would take me farther than disobedience, but I also now see the necessity of morals in terms of karma. I like receiving respect, cooperation, consideration and compromise from others and the fastest way to do this is to act this way towards others. I also like to maintain my life free of artificial influences such as alcohol, tobacco or other drugs to concentrate more fully on myself, and to keep my emotional life stable by choosing my friends carefully and cultivating good relations with my family and community. I take responsibility for my actions and strive to be respected by those whom I respect.

Speaking quasi-mathematically, I could probably map my system of beliefs onto yours or those of most other people with a transformation in the symbol set. There is still something I don’t understand about religion yet, especially monotheistic ones: Is God the simplest answer? Is God the most beautiful answer? Is God the most satisfying answer? Is God a necessary answer? Is God the only answer? I would venture to guess that everyone would respond differently to my query. Is God a separate entity? part of us? a different term for something we all experience? a convenient system? Again the responses to this will vary. Were we given 11 or 12 dimensions and 3 or 4 forces and set at the mercy of entropy or was our universe carefully guided by an omnipotent hand? If our universe is entirely deterministic, did our consciousness arise from the substance of the universe, or did God intervene again as He did before the beginning of time?

I accept now the idea that people need and want faith and that its benefits to ones life may outweigh the potential intellectual and spiritual atrophy, but I do not now know if and when I will ever want or need faith personally.

————-

And Steiner says… “To act out of freedom does not exclude moral laws, but rather includes them. Still, it stands on a higher level than action dictated by moral laws alone. Why should my action serve the welfare of the whole any less if I have acted out of love than if I acted only because I feel a duty to serve the welfare of the whole? The simple concept of duty excludes freedom, because duty does not recognize individuality but demands instead subjection of individuality to a general norm. Freedom of action is thinkable only from the standpoint of ethical individualism.”

and

“Humans remain in an incomplete state if they do not take in hand the transformative substance within themselves, and transform themselves through their own power. Nature makes human beings merely natural creatures; society makes them law-abiding actors; but they can only make themselves into free beings. At a certain stage of their development, nature releases human beings from her chains; society carries this development up to a further point; but human beings must give themselves the final polish.

“The standpoint of free morality does not claim that the free spirit is the only form in which a human being can exist. Free morality sees in free spirituality only the final stage of human evolution. This is not to deny that acting in accordance with norms has its justification as one stage in evolution. But it cannot be acknowledged as the absolute standpoint of morality. The free spirit overcomes such norms in that free spirits do not merely feel commandments as motives, but order their actions according to their impulses (intuitions).”

When we are in tune and I can maneuver just the right resonating shape to my mouth, I start to feel the overtones produced by the consonant vibrations in the room. My voice alone is not enough to excite the overtone series to an audible level. With the reinforcement of others, I hear—and actually feel—the overtones at play in my mouth. For some reason the 4th overtone is often the strongest. Sometimes I only hear the 1st (or 3rd?). The more in tune everyone is, the more overtones I can distinguish. When there is a bass in the class the overtones are most vibrant because having the fundamental down the octave makes the higher-order overtones much more noticeable.

For the physics background—when you have a resonating cavity of air (in the mouth of a singer, the bore of a flute, etc.) the main note you hear is but one of many frequencies (pitches) that are resonating in the cavity. However, there is a relationship among the allowed frequencies, due to the number of wavelengths that can fit in the cavity exactly. The lower order overtones are the strongest in volume, and the most harmonic with the fundamental pitch. The beginning of the overtone series goes:

1. up 1 octave from the fundamental pitch (e.g. C4, “middle C,” if C3 was the fundamental)
2. up a 5th from the 1st overtone (e.g. G4 given C3 as the fundamental)
3. up a 4th from the 2nd overtone, thus up 2 octaves from the fundamental (e.g. C5 if C3 was the fundamental)
4. up a major 3rd from the 3rd overtone (e.g. E5 for C3)
5. up a minor 3rd from the 4th overtone (e.g. G5 for C3)

For those paying careful attention we have now touched on all the notes in the major triad, going from 1 to 1′ to 5′ to 1” to 3” to 5”. From there on up, the overtone series covers ever more bases, and also deviates more significantly from the equal temperament scale (think piano keyboard) in pursuit of the mathematical purity and physical reality of the overtone series.

If you have a cavity whose shape you can manipulate, you can reinforce the strength of different overtones—I find for the chanting in yoga class it feels like a narrowing of my palate to capture the right overtones, but it must involve my tongue somehow. The space just above my tongue feels wide, but my palate feels narrow. If you’re exceptionally good at manipulating the shape of your resonating cavity to produce an audible overtone note while you are still sounding the fundamental, you may have a career opportunity as a throat singer Wikipedia says this ancient art may have originated in southwestern Mongolia, but you’ve most likely heard of it as Tuvan throat singing or Tibetan throat singing.

I’ve felt a similar effect in choral singing before where I can feel the notes the other singers are singing resonating in my mouth as I sing, but with the purity of the tone and pitch of singing “Om” together I can be much more clearly aware of the individual overtones. As I focus on them my awareness seems to bounce around from one to another, giving it a feeling of dancing or playing. I don’t know whether this is just due to my awareness, or to subconscious shifts in the shape of my resonating chambers to reinforce what I’m hearing.

When our group is not in tune I can feel the character of our out-of-tuneness—sometimes it feels like people having a cranky day, not ready to settle into this intense awareness of other people’s pitch. Sometimes it’s the awkwardness of newbies hastily singing, caught off guard, finding the pitch with a stab in the dark. But when we get it right and all the angels are singing right there in my mouth I experience a deep joy and sense of connection that the word “Om” must be designed to elicit.

So wish me yoginis and yogis with good ears, and a few good basses in the mix!

In tonight’s class, the instructor was talking about kalapurnata, which she explains in her own blog post here:  http://yoga-sanctuary.blogspot.com/2011/01/living-in-fullness-of-time.html — living in the fullness of time — in past, present and future alike.  Towards the end of the class we did some poses with a back foot firmly rooted to the earth, strongly buoying us up while the front foot led us into the future — and in midst of one of these, I had a sudden muscle memory of feeling that stance in scuba diving.

When you are boat diving, there are a couple ways to enter the water, the most direct being the “giant stride.”  There you stand on deck of a boat, heavily laden with gear.  You shuffle up to the edge in your fins and then plant your back foot firmly, giving you stability on a rocking boat and a base from which to push forward, launch your leading foot far out over the water, and from there plummet into that sweet, sweet abyss!  The rear foot is not something that is left behind or neglected, or surpassed — it is an essential foundation for the next step, and it must be strong enough to allow you to make a wide step out a safe distance from the edge of the boat.

Photo credit: spartanjoe, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Now all the analogies here seem quite obvious to me, and maybe even trite to you But what fascinates me is that this insight only bubbled up to my conscious mind when my legs felt themselves doing that work in yoga that they’d done in the giant stride while scuba diving so many years ago.  I’m pleased that the discipline of yoga has gotten the wisdom embedded in my body to make itself heard to higher levels of consciousness where my intuition can integrate this knowledge.

By the way, the other way to get off a boat that I know of is to sit on the gunwale, facing in to the midline of the boat, and then hurtle yourself backwards, letting the weight of the tank on your back bring you down.  There’s a lesson in there, too…Or if you have a ladder over the side of the boat, I suppose you could leave your fins off, climb down the ladder, and then put the fins on once you’re floating in the water, but that’s just annoying and not nearly as cool as plunging in!

This was written after seeing the total solar eclipse in Germany in 1999. I had many parts linked to maps or useful astronomy pages, but most are gone. Props to NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day and the Exploratorium for having links that are still valid almost 12 years later!

I saw the eclipse from outside of Stuttgart with my German and American family. Traffic was backed up on the autobahn about 30k from Stuttgart, which was on the center line of the eclipse, so we just pulled off the road and parked at the top of a little hill in Schwäbisch Hall. We set up our tailgate party about an hour and a half before the total eclipse and watched the partial eclipse while picnicking. The weather was partly cloudy and at times we had 13 people ranging in age from 4 to 74 yelling in English and German at the clouds to disperse or at least for any particularly dense cloud to pass quickly by. Other groups of people soon joined us along the ridgeline, and an older woman biked slowly by calling out (auf Deutsch) “The Savior is coming!” She was headed in the direction of a small church. At noon, half an hour before totality, the church bell rang out an alarm for several minutes, and then the woman biked back the way she came, repeating her tidings. The wind picked up speed and we watched the sun disappear through passing veils of mist. Only in the very last minutes before totality did we notice a dimming of light, because the lighting had been so variable due to the clouds that we couldn’t trust it was the fading sun until it was a quite eerie evening light. A flock of ducks winged in their awkward way by, which might have been just a normal occurrence, but I’d like to imagine that they were confused into heading home for nightfall. At the moment totality was reached, the sky between us and the sun was clear! We all saw the ghostly coronal halo around the sun, and those who were collected enough to make detailed observations (my dear mother among them) saw “red beads” along the rim. I was too excited to even pretend a scientific observation of the details or the timing. A cloud did cover the sun partway through, allowing us only maybe 30 seconds of clear viewing, but no one was disappointed by the show. Venus was also visible but we were too distracted by the Sun to look for any other planets or stars during the eclipse, and besides which, the sky was mostly cloudy. It was pouring rain in Stuttgart during totality, as we saw on TV later, so in fact we were lucky that we couldn’t make it to the central line. As the diamond ring appeared on the opposite side of the sun everyone applauded the sun and moon for their perfectly executed pas de deux.

When we move on to whatever format replaces blogging, I hope this will make it easier to port more of my writings with me.  If we end up in a post-electricity and post-internet world, then this will be useless, but until then, enjoy!  First up, a bit of a travelogue.  If that goes over well, I may post the more personal stuff!

Now there are all sorts of “push” solutions involving more education and more convenience to vegetables – to the point of literally putting them in convenience machines, but I’m not sure that in the storied past when everyone did eat their vegetables that it was simply a matter of being more educated about vegetables and that vegetables were more convenient in the past. What could be more convenient than all the pre-packaged solutions we have now? How could we have known more about the health benefits in the past and just forgotten what we knew and ignored the newer information as more and more reasons to eat enough vegetables are found? Can we find some “pull” solutions where we actually are intrinsically motivated to eat our vegetables and don’t just do it because we manage to muster the willpower to make ourselves do it?

What are the root causes, then, if not ignorance and some inherent inconvenience of vegetables? My theories? We are lacking:

• cheaper vegetables
• tastier vegetables
• more time in our lives to grow, prepare and enjoy our vegetables!

Cheaper Vegetables

#1 Economics have a strong sway over us – our food budget would tilt more towards vegetables if they weren’t competing with heavily subsidized commodity products like corn and wheat and all the processed foods made therefrom.
#2 Growing our own vegetables can be cheaper than buying from a store, but here’s an area where a little education can help, and access to materials… and time!

Tastier Vegetables

#1 Organic, local, homegrown, healthy soils, etc, etc. make for healthier, tastier vegetables – it’s no surprise people are not rushing to eat lettuce shipped from 3000 miles away
#2 And here’s what really inspired me to write my thoughts down on the vegetable conundrum - I blame the low-fat diets of the last 30 years for reducing vegetables to something boring and bland. Sure you can try to spice them up, but you can tire of that, too. What’s really satisfies and appeals to your tastebuds again and again is fat – a nice pat of butter on top of your beans, bacon with your brussel sprouts, root vegetables tossed in olive oil and roasted. There’s a yummy video over on the 180 Degree Health blog about butter-poached carrots that I’m dying to try!

More Time in our Lives

Oh, this would solve so many of our problems in this culture! Why do we have higher productivity than other nations and less satisfaction with life? Why despite our advanced health care facilities do we struggle with lifestyle diseases? With some more time to call our own, we will have the energy to tend and harvest a garden, to spend those 90 minutes butter-poaching carrots, to chop fresh veggies for a salad, to go for a walk after dinner with the family… Why is our response to the lack of time in American lives to sell pre-peeled and pre-cubed butternut squash, and baby carrots, and pre-washed greens? These things need industrial processing, and centralized production, so we get corporate food from somewhere else in the country, wrapped in a bunch of extra packaging that may be impossible to recycle, and this is a convenience? And tastes good??

Now I’ve read The Continuum Concept and know that in some cultures children are allowed to use knives from such a young age that they can barely manage to hurt themselves with it, and I’m sure that experience of minor knife accidents is a good teacher and children learn to respect knives early and handle them early, but I wasn’t quite ready to make the leap.

But the idea kept nagging me, and I had my inspiration when I remembered reading Julie of the Wolves way back in grade school, and learning a little about Alaskan natives and I remembered being impressed that children were allowed to use a knife called an ulu with a half-moon blade. This was also the knife women used for their cooking needs, as opposed to the long, straight-bladed hunting/slaughter knives.

A little modern hunt on Amazon revealed the existence of two-handled half-moon knives – called mezzalunas after the Italian word for a half-moon. Coincidentally, my online handle in a number of forums is “mezzaluna” which I chose for the astronomical significance, not even knowing about the knife at the time!

Two handles was the important part here – a traditional Alaskan ulu has one handle you grip in your palm, but with a two-handled knife, there’s no chance you’ll get a finger under the blade and exert enough pressure to hurt yourself. I ordered a Nigella Lawson brand beauty of a mezzaluna on Amazon, along with a slightly bowl-shaped cutting board.

Here’s my happy boy, chopping up apples last fall to make applesauce!

A few words about knife skills for tots – anything that has a chance of rolling off the cutting board will! I showed my son how to chop the apple in half first, then lay the halved apple flat side down to cut further chunks without rolling. For longer items like cucumbers or carrots, I will pre-cut in half lengthwise for him, and let him cut the pieces from there.

Let me know if you try this with your kids!

I first had the idea maybe a year ago, but it took me a while to find the courage to even propose it to my husband as a new family habit. I was both excited and scared that he would agree to the plan and that I would have to go through with it. We’d been adding more Shabbat observances to our Friday nights and starting to create a real space for a sabbath there – preferring to stick to home or with close friends on Friday nights rather than going to events, and doing whatever we were doing together as a family. My husband was raised Jewish but followed its practices only to a minimal extent, despite deep interest in and respect for a lot of the traditions. It may be cliche, but since having kids we have wanted to teach them about their heritage, and build beautiful family traditions, and a Friday night Shabbat celebration was becoming part of that. Doing a digital fast was a leap from a single observance Friday night to setting aside the sabbath as a unique day of the week.

Previous to our experiment, I admit I felt sabbath days were days of deprivation and restriction. I thought that calling it a day of “rest” was trying to make the best of challenging circumstances, and that calling it a “gift” was a sure sign of being hopelessly enchanted by your religion.

The first night we tried it, I was at such loose ends, I actually tackled cleaning my bedroom closet – something that always sinks to the bottom of my priority list. Realize that I run a large part of my life through the computer – work, social and volunteering – and my usual state at home is to have the laptop open with me going back and forth between taking care of things in the virtual world and the real world. The next day the morning was so peaceful – just enjoying being with my family without feeling distracted or stressed by what else I could be doing on my computer. The middle of the day was fairly normal – time spent doing things together as a family as we always do. In the evening we put the kids to bed, and I actually savored the last bit of time free of the computer before taking a deep breath and plunging back in.

We enjoyed the experiment enough that we have repeated it every week since, and found a few challenges, and many blessings. It is almost humorous how adrift we are without the computers – wondering what Google Calendar is trying to tell us we have scheduled for the day, needing to look up phone numbers and store opening hours for errands we want to run, wanting to check the weather, missing last minute invitations (and cancellations) due to being offline for over 24 hours… We’ve allowed a couple exceptions to the rules – we will use Skype to talk to remote relatives (hi guys!) and I can use my iPod Touch to look at my shopping list if I go, but any new items for the list go on a piece of paper. I’ve started the habit of keeping a sheet of paper near me for shabbat to write down new to-do items and shopping list items, and to write down anything beforehand from my computer that I need to operate for the day.

The annoyances are trivial, though, and the blessings are profound. The whole day is more peaceful and the everyday stresses are at least paused, since there is little we can do about them until Shabbat is over. Our attention and focus can be directed in longer duration to each other and our children. Creativity has space to well up. I find time to pick off tasks from the nether regions of my to-do list, which always gives me a great psychological boost – those tasks can hang over my head for months or years – never important enough to do, but important enough to add to my stress level.

Most importantly for me, in taking 1/7th of my week off from being digitally connected, I have gained more perspective on my computing – able to use it more to serve my needs rather than just using it by default when I’m not doing anything else. The creativity I feel while offline helps guide my priorities for using my time when I am online. And it’s a good thing it’s reduced my idle use of my computer, since it compresses the time I have available for the high priority things I do!

I’ve also been seeing the contrast between my privileged life of space-age intellectualish pursuits and the life of constant manual labor lived by most people in the world and through history. I am thankful to live in a time and culture where I have the privilege of being able to create my own sabbath traditions, but I also appreciate now how universal the appeal is of a day of rest. If I feel this much joy from a respite from *my* daily chores, how much more must a person feel who receives the sabbath as a gift from a loving deity to permit them to rest from their hard labors, reflect on their lives and refresh and rededicate themselves for the week ahead.

This week we had a very special Shabbat – we had been visiting my husband’s family for three weeks and had just set out Friday morning for several days of road-tripping home when we ran over a car’s wheel that was loose in the middle of the highway. Our two driver side tires blew out and we skidded to a stop in the second-to-left of four lanes on the Raleigh beltline. After a few terrifying minutes worrying we’d be rear-ended by someone going 65mph talking on their cell-phone, traffic got blocked behind us and we were merely stuck waiting for police and tow truck. After calling 911, I called back to my in-laws, who came out to retrieve us.

Now our hosts were supposed to be flying to Mexico that day for work, but one was too sick to go and then the flight was cancelled for the other. So we ended up at their home, none of us expecting 24 hours prior that we would be there at all. Exactly two shabbat candles were found in the house. An exquisite challah was procured from a French bakery, and out came a modestly priced wine that was the honestly the best I’ve ever had. Perhaps the fear and upheaval of the day made us savor the meal that much more, but, if I’m not deluding myself, it was really an amazing Shabbat materially as well as spiritually…

Spiritually, because I’ve never had a Shabbat where I felt so thankful for family and togetherness, and for my very life – and the very structure of Shabbat helped me through my reactions to the accident – it offered a time where I could formally be thankful and reflect on my gratitude for what we have, and our practice of being offline for Shabbat gave me the space in the day following the accident to just enjoy my family and let the events of Friday morning sink in without repressing and distracting it all away with computer use. The myriad details that needed dealing with in the aftermath of the accident – all the rearranging of plans – were put on hold until after Shabbat – with only the most urgent happening either before the start of Shabbat, or by phone during Shabbat. I would like to think that these events were not part of any master plan, but if so, all I can say is thank you G-d for Shabbat!

So – she got the juice carton on the table and poured herself maybe 2 ounces. Then she studied the carton. There is a picture of a tall glass of orange juice, next to an orange. She said to me “Mama, somebody poured too much orange juice, and that’s too bad!” I asked if she thinks it’s for a grown-up or a kid, and she says it’s a grown-up and it’s still too much. I suggested maybe a grown-up could share their big glass of orange juice with someone else and then it wouldn’t be too much. She agreed and says they could share the orange, too. I honestly hadn’t even noticed the orange in the picture – it was just a signifier of the orange-ness of the juice to me – not a depiction of the product in the carton, or even a suggested way to serve the product (who eats oranges alongside their orange juice?). Leave it to the two-year old to see an orange as literally an orange that a person or two might want to eat.

I tried to tell her the picture of the tall glass of orange juice was probably just meant to make people think it was OK to drink a big, big glass of orange juice, so that the company could sell more OJ. I think that went over her head

I can only conclude our OJ is brainwashing us. The image suggests that drinking a big tall glass is appropriate, and it suggests that juice is comparable to fresh fruit. Some fun facts below trumpet how an 8 oz. glass counts as two servings of fruit, and the potassium content is “as much as a medium banana.” Funny how children are supposed to be brainwashed by advertising, but my two-year old spotted the literal truth in the images, and I was the one more oblivious to the messages.

I often reflect on the wisdom I’ve learned from my Nana, and a few things from her are bits of wisdom passed on from her mother, the only great-grandparent of mine I ever got to know. One bit of wisdom all the way from Gammy is that it is uncouth to serve food at the table in its original labelled container. Sugar goes in a sugar bowl, milk in a milk pitcher, jam in a dish with a spoon. My Nana followed this custom to some extent, but didn’t take it as far as her mother – never bothered with the jam, and kept things more casual at breakfast and lunch. My Gammy must have learned this rule about 100 years ago, and I’ve always thought it was genteel, but terribly old-fashioned. But suddenly, I’m thinking unmarked containers could be the wave of the future in keeping advertising at bay in our intimate dining lives at home! And I’m more grateful than ever for our containers that are unmarked because they are home-made products – black raspberry jam from a friend, and peach ginger jam of ours… homemade yogurt and kefir… should I take the fresh-squeezed OJ plunge? I don’t want to be brainwashed by our OJ anymore!

A word obscure enough it would probably make a good choice in a game of Dictionary/Balderdash – it is the little indentation in a person’s upper lip.

My husband tells me its origin according to Jewish lore has to do with our pre-natal education: in the womb, an angel tells us all the mysteries of life, and then presses a finger to our upper lips, creating the philtrum, and in that instant we forget. We spend our whole lives marked by that angel, trying to regain what we knew and lost before birth.

Lack of a philtrum is one of those mid-line birth defects (which I’ve written about in a post on tongue-ties ) that can arise from a toxic environment in the womb, such as in the case of fetal alcohol syndrome.

I first starting thinking about philtrums in the context of breastfeeding mechanics. For a comfortable and effective latch, a baby must flange both lips out and not pinch the breast. In this act, the philtrum is folded back against the nose, or even folded in half on itself – I can see an mild red horizontal crease in my daughter’s upper lip sometimes when she’s done nursing. The upper lip stays stationary while the lower lip moves along with the jaw and tongue to perform the suckling action.

One piece of breastfeeding advice sometimes given is to tickle the newborn’s philtrum with the nipple to induce them to tilt their heads up a bit, open wide and draw in the nipple into a nice asymmetrical latch. When the lower lip and jaw encompass more breast tissue than the upper, the baby is maximally effective at drawing milk from the breast by using the jaw movement and tongue action to compress milk ducts in a wave-like motion and bring the milk out.

The tilt of the baby’s head also opens up the throat for the easiest drinking experience (try sipping a cup of water with your head completely level versus tilting your chin up a bit, or imagine what you’d do if you really wanted to gulp back a drink).

Could it be that the philtrum is a landing strip of sorts? A mark for a mother to follow to know where to stimulate her new baby to nurse? Perhaps the natural feeding sequence is even more subconscious than this, but this doesn’t seem like a bad backup indicator.

Now, I have been trying to figure out if there is a difference in sensation between the lower lip and upper lip. It feels subjectively to me that the upper lip is more sensitive. All I can find by googling is that the lips are served by different nerves. The nerve that is responsible for upper lip sensation also serves the lower eyelids and the cheeks. The nerve for the lower lip serves the jaw and chewing muscles.

The high sensitivity of the philtrum led the ancient Greeks to name it with their word for love. And what love could be more primal than infants in their first years of life receiving regular pleasant sensations at their philtrum in association with warm milk and closeness with their mother? Of course we lose this ritual at weaning, only to rediscover some of the sensation in kissing once we are mature. But let me take this one step further. Let me take this to Starbucks.

Yes, Starbucks. Picture yourself stopping in to your local Starbucks, or even your friendly neighborhood non-Starbucks café. Think about ordering one of those fancy drinks – a warm one, it’s winter… something milky and sweet. Caramel macchiato? Vanilla latte? You get a to-go cup – not staying and you forgot your travel mug. Bring it to your lips to sip. Tilt your head back, purse your lips. Make contact with the lid – it’s smooth on your lips, and there’s that agreeable pocket where your upper lip slides in. But wait, are you pinching down with your upper lip? No – you are relaxing it and letting it curl up. Your philtrum is folding back on itself as you tilt your head up and drink in that sweet warm milk. You feel cozy and happy. You tip well.

Kind of takes you back, doesn’t it? (I should mention that human milk, and therefore also infant formula for human babies, is much sweeter than the milks of other mammals, due to the human brain’s intense carbohydrate requirements.) When we drink from an open mug, or a to-go cup with a coffee lid rather than a latte lid, we don’t get that familiar soft pressure on the upper lip. I won’t even comment on how those who were weaned too young may have an unfulfilled need for this stimulation. Starbucks has addicted us to expensive lattes by tickling our philtrums!

I’ll leave you with a shot of my ugly “mug” having a “shot” of some fancy drink or other!