Parenting & Family Quote by Carlos Santana

Santana’s image is almost indecent in its honesty: birth doesn’t arrive wrapped in pastel metaphor, it arrives with flesh. “Chicken soup” is a startling choice because it’s domestic, ordinary, and a little too specific to be poetic in the usual way. It yanks the miracle of new life down into the kitchen, into the world of bodies and heat and broth. The point isn’t to cheapen the moment; it’s to insist that the sacred doesn’t float above the physical. It steams right out of it.

Then he pivots: lilies, “the flower of another garden.” Lilies are a loaded symbol in Western ritual life, common at funerals as much as at baptisms, carrying that clean, ceremonial scent people associate with chapels and thresholds. Santana makes that association explicit with “the spiritual garden,” suggesting that the delivery room is a border crossing. One smell roots you in animal reality; the other implies something borrowed from beyond, like a visitation.

The subtext is classic Santana: a musician steeped in mysticism, Afro-Latin spirituality, and the 1960s-era hunger to fuse sensual experience with transcendence. He’s describing the way life begins already braided with mortality and meaning. Newborns don’t just represent a future; they trigger a dizzying awareness of lineage, vulnerability, and the uncanny fact that consciousness arrives through meat.

It works because it refuses sentimentality. Santana doesn’t say “it’s beautiful.” He tells you what it actually smells like, then dares you to feel the spiritual inside that realism.