A week ago, my partner and I commemorated our fifth church wedding anniversary. We didn’t do anything special. We’d considered a meal at our favourite restaurant — Alte Post — where we also hosted the post-ceremony lunch during that pandemic era. But the mechanics of having to be seated for a three-course meal while managing a sleepy infant and picking up, mid-way, our almost four-year-old felt too challenging to manoeuvre. We did end up going to a restaurant that serves workers’ lunches, the South Tyrolean equivalent of a thali joint for working professionals, such as farmers and mechanics. But only because I had no time to cook. On the way back, as I strolled our youngest through the path lined by apple trees in the middle of the valley, I reminisced about having found the love of my life at the ripe age of 34, and coming into my own as a mother at 40. Instead of dwelling on the notion of the word ‘love’, I clung to the word ‘reverence’.

There’s so much discourse on the different kinds of love — platonic, romantic, devotional, fraternal, among others. Reverence lies at the crux of all of these manifestations. If you hear intonations of something sacred when I utter the word reverence, know that it is deliberate. I summon the word sacred beyond its religious or even spiritual trappings. I think of it as cosmic… To consider life and love in the same breath as the sacred is to espouse the inherent divinity of being. I am reminded that before I came to be, I was held within my mother’s womb, where I derived my nourishment placentally. Embedded within the cosmic dimensions of the word sacred is an implicit recognition of the many twists of fate, chance, misfortune or consequence that aligned to shape our personhood. Thus, to acknowledge the sanctity of life is to honour the reproductive labour that engendered our place within this world.