Now that I've shaved my beard, I've rediscovered these weird contours on my face, and the deepening lines (smile lines? Frown lines?) and the extra chins that the hair has obscured for the last few years.
One of the contours my fingers keep tracing is that cleft just between the nose and the upper lip. Why do we have that?
Rabbi Akiva Tatz (my co-author on Letters to a Buddhist Jew -- forgive me for repeating that, but perhaps someone will link to it) quotes Jewish sources saying that an angel teaches us Torah in the womb, and when we're born the angel smacks us on the mouth and we forget it all and have to go about rediscovering it. Others put it more gently -- an angel touches us on the upper lip, and the finger's-width depression reminds us of our contact with Divinity and our search to rediscover it.
Interestingly, this spot is the focal point of awareness in Zen meditation: focusing on the breath, your awareness naturally comes to rest on that spot where the breath enters and exits -- the locus of awareness, the site of movement and exchange that is the entrance (and exit) point of life itself.
It's the spot where God is said to have touched Adam, breathing life into his nostrils. It's the river of breath, the place where angels and Zen masters, the Divine and the Moment, all dwell.
Just a thought.
--T.A.
Many people think that no word exists in English for this cleft. But my eldest son, John, learned at about age ten that it's called the philtrum, and he proceeded to pester everyone around him with his knowledge of this word. He even wrote a letter to his favorite cartoonist, Bill Griffith, to ask why the cartoonist's main character, Griffy, lacked a philtrum. A signed original drawing of the character with philtrum was promptly mailed to John.
Posted by: Richard Lawrence Cohen | May 20, 2005 at 12:55 PM