Crab Apple

It’s the Taurus new moon and I am weeping. I am weeping because what has been buried has come to the surface.

Crab apple – for the person who feels there is something unclean and evil buried within them. As a survivor of abuse, this speaks to me deeply. My apprehension and my hope for this pregnancy have both been the same. That I will be healed. That it will be hard.

I know and believe in my heart, that our souls are always seeking to heal. We always seek resolution, walking similar paths hoping to find a different destination. If we are not conscious of this we can fall into the same hole again. If we are too cautious we will never find what we are looking for because we avoid the paths entirely.

Narcissistic abuse plants an evil seed within. The narcissist gets inside your soul and violates what you hold most sacred and dear. It’s a flaying of original innocence, that holy knowledge of our innate goodness we carry within us. Everything that is beautiful and pure they will make twisted and ugly.

You will become complicit in your own abuse, as you do more and more for a glimpse of the sunshine of their approval before it swiftly disappears behind a cloud, and hate yourself for this self-degradation.

What to take from a woman initiated through the womb?

Take the beauty and joy of her pregnancy. Take her admiration for her changing body. Take her reverence for her sexuality. Take her self-respect. Take her rest and make her work hard. Take away any sense of safety, within and without, so that all that’s left is the changeable face of a monster that must be pandered to and appeased. Take her newborn bliss. Take the sanctity of breastfeeding. Make it wretched. Make it disturbing. Take the first few years with her beloved child so that all she sees is danger everywhere. So that the sound of a man’s footsteps makes her gasp.

Pregnancy is a time of accumulation and absorption. When you cannot bleed with the moon, the energy grows and builds within the womb. This is why postpartum is so fragile, as the months of accumulation are shed in one go. There is a power and a weakness in the mother heavy with child. I feel it keenly. As my gait changes and with the force of the child moving. You can feel every single limb. You need so much more from others to be able to do this. You are able to give so much less. As your stomach capacity decreases your heart capacity increases to become this bottomless well where you could chug down all the love and not be satiated.

I feel it. The point where, if somebody chose to – they could perpetrate evil.

So I find myself nearly every day under the apple tree. Christened by the blossom and marvelling at the amount of bees, such a relief. Feeling the strength of the child, another relief. When I was sobbing this morning my husband suggested we go to the garden and I once again found myself under the apple tree. It’s been a long time since I’ve been this triggered. It’s been years. My body remembers and his body remembers. “I wanted to make a crab apple essence today…” I say once I have purged all the sadness and the sobs have subsided. To capture the magic of this spring and have it as medicine forever.

Then I read the words – for the person who feels there is something evil and unclean buried within them. In my vulnerability I’ve been letting this tree bless me over and over without even knowing.

I can see now how I’ve been instinctively trying to return to Eden.

Crab apple. For restoring that sense of innate goodness and holiness that lives within every person. For the one who has seen the darkest side of human nature and is forever changed. For the one who carries the shame of what was done to them. Like the apple blossom of spring scattered in the hair, the sweet scent carried on the breeze, both bringing joy and delight, we reclaim our original innocence. We do not need to be ashamed. We can enjoy the sensual delights of the season we are in and the sweet promise of harvest.

No one is coming into the garden to punish us.

Good Friday

A reminder today that a man doesn't need to be killed and tortured for your karma.

Every month women are shedding, bleeding and renewing for their communities.

Every month women are dying and resurrecting themselves for the salvation of the world.

Every month she descends into the underworld.

Every month she sheds everything she thought she knew and faces her psychic shadows and depths.

Every month she carries the weight of the world in her womb, births it as blood, and she returns it as an offering to the earth, knowing nothing is ever created or destroyed, only renewed.

When we return to womb consciousness we heal the distortion around sacrifice, blood and violence.

You can learn more about sacred menstruation through my online courses Sacred Womb Journeys and The Medicine Wheel of the Womb.

The land is blooming

The land is blooming and so am I. With delight, every day, discovering how the lady’s mantle and the mugwort have multiplied overnight. The cottage surrounded by forget me nots and apple blossom.

On the days the sun shines I am called to the garden with my sweet cat, or further up the hill to the secret bluebell grove, stopping to breathe more times than I used to. Where I stand beneath the birdsong, on the familiar tree long fallen and bare my body to the sun. The breasts that already are full of life, I noticed last week.

We have glorious days, and the days where the rain comes. Last night there was thunder and lightning and I thought of the raspberry leaves wilting in the herb trough and how we need the sun and rain in equal measure. And just how my body is thrumming and strong with life, it is also vulnerable to the emotional storms that beat down.

I work with ceremony and birth trauma, and when it’s needed, I share about the mother’s heart and how it is designed to open during pregnancy and birth.

My mother’s heart cracked open last week, like an egg smashed over my chest, and the vulnerability of it poured out and washed over my belly in a way that I still feel keenly and tenderly.

Sensing this, the babe pushes against my womb harder as if they could break through, testing their strength and the boundaries of my body.

I spent two years in the waterfall country recovering from trauma, away from my family and all I had built in South Wales. Even now I miss it. The real gift of it was to find god in the land, to allow myself to be mothered by trees and waterways and mountains.

Singing mantras as I let the land show me where everything I needed grew. There is the sense that, for this pregnancy I have allowed myself to become somewhat of a recluse. Given the option, I’d prefer to disappear away with the flowers.

I am learning so much.

I am becoming.