So fruitful she uprooted herself

The land always mirrors what is happening in the womb. I've been experiencing this for years now. The hen that cut her brooding prematurely short when I miscarried for the first time. The baby pear tree with no roots that foretold my second pregnancy loss. Then the chick that hatched the day my son was born.

Today - the apple tree that had not borne fruit for years, that sheltered us for my Mother Blessing, fell over with the weight of her abundant harvest.

Uprooted, secret places now exposed to the light. Raw, exposed and blinking. For years she slumbered in the garden, safe and stagnant, until now. I joked with my husband the reason the orchard is fruitful this year is because of my singing. He said to me today "what has your singing done now?"

She is me - toppled and uprooted by her own desire to bring life into the world. All that was hidden is now painfully revealed.

I have seen this nature mirroring happen with clients as well. The womb path is not a permanent blissed out state of "love and light"... it's holding the balance between life and death through the human body and the cosmic portal, and experiencing them as intensely physical, intensely spiritual, dark and thorny and beautiful. It's being the altar where the work happens. It's sad and holy and synchronous in ways that are miraculous.

The fierce and primal labour ward birth of Ted

Every birth is a lesson. I'm still waiting for the wisdom to unfold. It seems to me that to be postpartum is to be translucent - like a fairy's wing, the light shining through you.

Still touching the veil, not fully of this world. The spirit wandering while the body is tethered. Through the womb that bleeds, the eyes that weep, the breasts that feed. I pour with life, a vessel that is filled only to be emptied over and over in service to another.

To be postpartum is to be a beautiful, vacant shell, where a creature once lived, washed out by a wild storm. The shell remains, but a new creature has not come to claim the body as home. Yet.

My last caption and self-portrait before he came - Harvest. The old ones understood that every harvest demands a sacrifice.

The fierce and primal labour ward birth of Ted. My undisturbed, wild pregnancy culminating in the place I wanted to avoid. So far from what I planned, and yet I knew too much to ignore the signs of my body in labour that home was no longer the safest place to be. The stages of grief as I came to terms with my choice in that hospital room where I laboured all night on the floor.

The denial, the bargaining, the anger, the depression... The self-pity, the uncontrolled sobbing and wailing dredged from the depths of my being. I watched myself outside myself with the wise eyes of a doula and smiled and thought... good, good, knowing with every emotional release comes a further opening and descent. And eventually the acceptance as I slipped into the water of the pool and felt my hips widen and my waters break.

I have never been so loud in birth. Have never worked so hard to move a babe through my pelvis under such stressful conditions. I made sounds that I've never made before to bring him into the light. Then it was the job of others to help him fully transition into life.

In my second birth, the ego death was taking responsibility for my birth and baby and learning to find all my answers within, no external validation. For this third birth, I was being asked to allow the identity I built up around my freebirth to die. You already know the sound of your inner voice. You've received the dreams, the messages. The choice is yours. The power is yours. The unfolding will be what it will be...

So often I observe in my work that these babies come here to bridge gaps in our consciousness, to awaken us to an unconditional love that is beyond ideology. There was so much I had deconstructed in my mind already, but the body's wisdom is older and slower. It would have been easier to walk away from birth as a portal completed, thinking I'd learned all I needed to. And yet I chose to plunge back into the deep end to be scoured clean. For the walls of my hyper self-reliance to crumble.

Eternally grateful to Sam who was by my side the whole way. I keep thinking of the psalm "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me"

There is more to share but it's not for now or this space. I have no regrets - I would make the same choices again.

So here I am - with the wind still blowing through me. If you hold me to your ear you might even hear the roar of the sea.

Motherhood - a three part initiation

Motherhood as a rite of passage for modern women is fragmented. What is offered to us is an attempt at recreation, a poor imitation of what the soul truly desires. For so many women passing through it feels that something significant is missing, a fundamental need has gone unmet.

Initiations are three-part.

First we have separation. We must leave what is comfortable and known, and go off into the unknown. For the hero in a fantasy novel this means a quest. For a woman initiated through the blood mysteries, this is an inner journey. Her loved ones gather to bid her farewell. She packs her precious items, gifts, talismans that may be useful.

She becomes The Fool in the Tarot, her womb-bag containing all she needs within her. She is not truly alone, for she has her faithful friend by her side.

Then we have the ordeal. For the fantasy hero? Slaying a dragon, rescuing a princess. For the mother? She must surrender to the pangs of her body and her womb as the child makes it's way into the world. Some believe the mother must travel to bring the soul of her baby to earth.

I believe that labour is the process of the ego surrendering to the new soul, and any resistance in the mother must collapse over and over to make way for this life coming through. She must reach deep within herself, her darkest wells and oldest shadows, to emerge victorious as Mother.

Then we have the return. Our hero is lauded by the villagers who can't quite believe they have returned - the same and yet not the same. The new mother is massaged, sung to, rocked and wrapped. She is given everything the baby is given. Then she emerges from her cocoon reborn, integrated and whole.

In the Mother Blessing we honour the separation. In Closing the Bones we honour the return. Mind, body and soul ache for this story, this integration. I have held these spaces for many years now, and one of the hardest things I had to surrender was the idea of leaving this work for a time to reinitiate myself in the Mystery.

And yet even now writing this, I understand that this embodiment is also the work.