a beautiful and tragic story

the birth of an animist mother

Jan 31, 2025

Greetings and Welcome to Wild Leaf, a publication of writings from the wild remembrance of the Holy Now. If you like what you read, kindly tap the “❤️” at the bottom of the page here, so others can find this publication too.

This isn’t everyone’s story. And, in some ways, it is everyone’s story. But really, it’s my own story, as I untangle the impacts of my birth and arrival here on Mother Earth.

Soft light glows around the curtains in the bedroom. Amara is still deeply sleeping, half covered by the heavy quilt and down blanket. I can hear the humming house all around us, the electricity pulsing through the walls, the pressure of the forced air through vents in the floor, the humidifiers. I want to stay in bed all day.

I slept. A miracle I have created using the most unusual of solutions, which I will not share now until I have had my fill of restful nights. Last night was the third night of sleep in a row.

My thoughts start creeping over the demands of the day: getting out of bed, clicking on the odd blue light water kettle, making tea and breakfast for Amara (what’s in the fridge?), creating interesting activities for the three year old, feeling into our family’s larger trajectory, needs and expectations, preparing a nutritious lunch, dinner and snacks, folding the pile of laundry on the couch, organize the recycling, tend to the chickens and the pile of dishes in the sink, did I sent that invoice to Alicia?, return a few emails, update our website, send out that package to our friend in Arizona, did Christmas gifts ever go out?, pay land taxes, personal taxes, should I make a huge batch of homemade granola?, god, my car is a nightmare, remember to fast in the morning and eat enough protein, avoid sugar, relax, tend to the wellbeing —

Amara stirs and wakes. She sits ups immediately, leans quickly into my face and begins telling me something about how light it is outside and mama, don’t make it dark again, and “I need to poop!”

As the morning moves along, my child hollering about hunger and snacks, “no milk!”, she demands, I try to move this obscene white metal gate left here for us to separate my child from their dog and the entire thing falls apart on the floor, poles and parts rolling everywhere, beneath the couch and into the other room. “Mama you broke it!” I panic. The house is humming like we are inside a giant machine or in the center of a tornado.

I open the back door to let in some cool morning air, hoping its aliveness will help calm me down, but the swelling ball of overwhelm and grief begins rising in my chest.

“I’m hungry Mama! Food!”

Okay, okay, at least some fresh air is coming in. Screw the fence. I’ll set out some warm milk and chicken soup on the table. Amara comes running full speed, trips and now is in tears on the floor holding her knee. The soup starts boiling over, the dishes are a mile high, the house hums.

I pick up my child, here baby, show me, show me where it hurts.

✧ ✧ ✧

Last night we visited our dear friends who recently gave birth to their second child, a precious little boy, a little over a month ago. They seem well, tucked into a cozy food- and friend-filled home.

My friend, a new mama of two, is glowing. She is so happy. I’m amazed. She tells me how she felt so supported after her first birth, “but this,” she says, “is a whole new level.” She has friends coming by every day, tending to her littles, helping with dishes and cooking food. She is beautiful, radiant. Her friends are lovely and considerate. I am completely perplexed.

She sits down next to me on the couch. “We finally made love last night. So good,” she says, “we really needed that.” She’s now the mother of two young children, one who is nursing through the night, and the other who is still two years old. I don’t know how to respond. My own sex drive seemed to vanish like mist as the stress and sleep deprivation commanded my vital force to tend to my survival.

I excuse myself to use the restroom - it is exquisite. Aromas of gentle herbs and oils accent the beautiful altar laid out on the shelf in front of the toilet: a stone carved woman, resting on her hands, next to a little plant and a dish of palo santo. Spotless. How, I ask myself, does she keep this pristine altar with a two year old running around?

I am appreciating the beauty, the soft incandescent lighting everywhere making the home feel like a warm cave, and the amazing meal cooked by their friend’s boyfriend, a chef from the UK. I am, also, of course, subtly comparing everything about this situation to my own.

I am genuinely confounded.

Maybe I have normalized or internalized my own struggle so deeply that in the presence of a seemingly happy, healthy, thriving family, I find myself completely confused - how could this be??

She is surrounded by friends she loves and who love her and there is a feeling of celebration everywhere, luxury, ease and love. This is the way it should be, and yet, the contrast to my own experience is unsettlingly palpable.

I had dreamed of a sacred family nesting after Amara’s birth, but found I was sorely unprepared. I found myself in the most raw, tender, open and psychically sensitive realm of my life, that almost anyone who came by left me swimming in a wave of alienation. I needed an all-knowing grandmother tree of a woman, who knew and who had been through it all, who could cut through my insecurities and understandingly hold my face, wipe my tears and feed me soup. I needed a strength and a compassion deeper than my own (you, Carrie T., were the closest to this and I thank you with all my heart for your friendship). I realized how feeble all my human relationships seemed to be; my friends and family felt a million galaxies away.

Eventually I asked everyone to leave, feeling like the solitude would be easier. But, of course it wasn’t, I was falling apart, bleeding, hungry, overwhelmed, brokenhearted. This began the three years of sleeplessness.

✧ ✧ ✧

Amara is finally eating her breakfast, dropping off bits of shredded chicken to the dog on the floor after I’ve asked her a hundred times not to.

I’m sipping tea, feeling this growing ball of overwhelm-grief-rage rising now in my throat. I want to weep. I feel something is wrong with me, something is terribly wrong.

There’s a notebook sitting on the table next to my mug and I feel it pulling me in, inviting me to take this moment to write as Amara is occupied with her breakfast and mischievous acts. I begin to write like a mad woman, scribbling as fast as I can think, page after page, hoping to understand why this sudden emotional tidal wave is engulfing me.

Ah, it begins to emerge: Belonging.

This old wound, the never-been-felt anomaly of my strange lived experience, since, maybe, my own birth. I have never really felt like I belong to any human community, family, people or person. I have never really experienced that feeling of being deeply held, nurtured and seen by another human, in a safe way, like I can let go within the warm circle of companionship. There has been so much loss. So much fracturing and betrayal. I just don’t feel like humans are a safe place to be.

This is why I’d rather merge with a flock of seagulls than maintain friendships with two-leggeds. This is why I’d rather cradle myself in the nook of an old cottonwood tree than call on a friend in a time of need. I feel closer to the wind than my own family. The wilderness allows me to be the shape I am and there, among the flickers and mule deer, I can spread my wings. I feel a sense of belonging, of acceptance.

And this is the wound that has driven me deeper and deeper into the wilderness, carrying my confused and broken heart, to the feet of mountains and rivers, seeking solace and the yearning to be held, really held, by something greater than myself.

It is a beautiful, tragic story, really. And motherhood has compounded it all, forcing me to face the patterns of avoidance - all my brokenness and grief around human relationships. It’s even more compounded because solitude with a small child is not really solitude (which I cherish), it is actually a recipe for overwhelm and depression. I am cripplingly cautious of company, and yet it is what I need more than ever.

Where did all this begin; this spiraling story of my wound, where are its roots?

✧ ✧ ✧

Amara is playing in the snow now. The sun has risen over the tall hills of this valley where she and I have come to heal for a while. The frost has melted. She is scooping little cups full of crunchy snow and putting them in the bird feeder. She finds a spider, relocates it to the grass, looks up at me.

I wonder about my own birth story, when I arrived earth-side in the Rose Hospital in Denver, Colorado. Is this where it all began? Maybe so.

Amara is my growth edge, in many dimensions, but right now, this morning, she’s magnifying my edges of transformative motherhood and human companionship. She is my reason to greet the old wound and marvel at its tracks through my past. She is my family, afresh, and I am hers, and as we grow together there is the opportunity to unravel the past and to transform the old tracks into something new, like a trickling spring or a trail of feathers.