Imprints & Pathways
(Poems about becoming)
By Sophie Rouméas

I.    The Imprint of Your Birth
(A symbolic interpretation)
By Sophie Rouméas

You were born, my child,
from the meeting of your father and your mother.

The imprint of their life upon yours
is surely far greater
than we might imagine at first glance.

You were born from this meeting of their bodies.
Whether that meeting was
joyful, tender, troubled, hurried,
loving, or simply physical,
you receive all the nuances of their lived experience.

And these nuances have left their trace.
They have tinted your first gaze upon the world,
your first way of entering it.

In the months preceding your arrival,
your father, your mother,
were each living their own journey.

Even before your conception,
life was already in motion.

What your father-to-be was going through—
his impulses, his choices, his relationships,
his tensions, his hopes, his renunciations—
colored the space
in which you were about to emerge.

The father is not only a man,
and the mother not only a woman.

They are also forces in motion.

The father carries the impulse—that
which decides,
which orients,
which moves outward.
The mother carries the welcoming—that
which receives,
which contains,
which brings back inward.

These forces are not fixed.
They circulate,
they shift,
they transform.

During that time before your conception,
these forces were at work,
consciously or not,
peacefully or otherwise.

Your mother-to-be was already present as well.
Even if her experience predominates more clearly
in other cycles of time,
what she feels, what she lives then already infuses—
—in the background, the meeting yet to come.

Thus, some time before your conception,
something took shape,
with or without a conscious plan,
with or without a formulated intention,
yet with a real coherence.

What they were living then
accompanied your arrival, like an imprint.

In this symbolic reading of the living,
imagine yourself as a tree.

The roots, fixed, sink into the earth:
the solid, the concrete, the real.
The earth welcomes you, you can lean on it, rest upon it.
Your stable base is your earth-mother.

The branches, mobile, rise toward the sky:
the mental, the abstract, the world of ideas.
It is the father who orients, orders, conceives projects—
the landmarks without which one can feel lost.

And you, in the middle: the Child.

Just as man or woman connects sky and earth,
the child is the link between father and mother.
Neither merged nor separated: inseparable.

“Child” speaks both father and mother at once.
For without a child, man and woman are neither father nor mother:
they are simply a man and a woman.

You are the incarnation between sky and earth.

Let us return to your conception.

Whether you were desired or not,
from the moment your father’s flow meets your mother’s flow,
you become a biological project.

At your birth, when the umbilical cord is cut,
your biological identity becomes biological autonomy.
You no longer depend on your mother’s womb, your first matrix.

During the first months following your birth,
you are mainly imbued with your mother’s lived experience:
her presence in all dimensions, her antibodies…
you learn the physical dimension, the concrete, the real,
the environment, the territory.

The ninth month after your birth symbolically marks
the beginning of your psychological identity.

Thus, your singular human imprint is formed
before your conception,
during your gestation,
and throughout a few precious months after your birth.

Those months that leave a lasting imprint…
You still walk, carried
by what began without you,
whether you are conscious of it or not.

Would you like to walk a little way together
to understand how your first perceptions, beliefs, values
and strengths, were formed—
and also your automatic patterns, your conflicts, your traumas,
your projects, your dreams, perhaps?

I am willing to accompany you,
through the poems that will follow,
through my readings, my understanding, my experience.

I will tell you of genealogy,
of cycles and resonances,
and of love—
the one that makes everything possible.

P.S.: This text offers a symbolic reading of life.
It doesn’t claim to establish biological causality, but opens a space for resonance.