Many of  of us have seen the amazing footage of the fertilization of a human ovum. The luminous gravid egg, glowing translucent on the film, the frantic, struggling race of the sperm to reach it and the moment of union. It does seem to speak volumes about human nature doesn't it? But relax, this is not about the differences between male and female.  I am thinking instead about the huge gamble on the part of these two essential pieces of ourselves.  The egg arrives faithfully every month with no guarantee it will ever be more than an egg.  Sperm are produced, well, shall we just say often.  And surely the success odds of  individual sperm  are breathtakingly worse than even winning the Mega Million Jackpot. Yet, just like the lottery, you can't win, if you don't play. Translation: every one of us start our lives as a risk taken.

Risk. The leap into the unknown, without guarantees or indemnity, often accompanied by it's terrible cousin fear.  We are easily caught churning and wrangling over whether to take one and forget that's how we got here.  Maybe deep in our DNA we still remember the frantic exhausting swimming. I don't know, but we do carry both parts of that union:  the capacity to wait, like the egg and also to swim like your life depended on it, like the sperm. Sometimes in order to be who we truly know ourselves to be, to answer a yearning or calling or itch that won't subside,  we have to stop passively enjoying floating around in the existing circle of our own life and jump out into the dark water after what is calling from a place we have never been before.

When I watched the film I recall that at the point the triumphant sperm was welcomed by the egg, the room went silent.  I was much too young then to understand why, but now I think might. It was because the union was about much more than biology. It was profoundly intimate and soulful. The luminous coming together eloquently portrayed  the creativity inherent in love and desire. But there was something more. The focus on the penetration was only a breath. What happened after when the egg began to multiply and grow brought the real gift, for there on the screen was the reward for finding what was calling.

"The will to be oneself, is heroism."--Ortega y Gassett.