bringing the water down

mud, floods and birth

This morning, at dawn, as the spring rains were pouring down, cloudy, misty intelligences filling the skies with their otherworldly tendings, Scott left to help bring the water down.

Two years and four months ago, I was in labor with my daughter. No hospital, no pain medication, just me, my partner, a blessed friend and our midwife. Some seven hours in, my water hadn’t broken and we thought our daughter was going to be born in the sac, which they call an en caul birth. In some cultures that is considered an auspicious birth.

(Aren’t all births auspicious?)

But when the laboring went on and the momentum seemed to slow, the midwife decided it was time to pop the sac. So, in one of the most excruciating moments of my life, she stuck her hand in there, through the cervix, and grabbed hold of the amniotic sac. With the next contraction it felt like a balloon had popped in my belly and out gushed what seemed like a flood of water and blood.

Then our daughter began her true descent.

From the mountain to the valley.

By the time she was earthside, the sun had risen and a soft snow was falling. I was on the floor of the upstairs bedroom of our friends’ cottage. The final moments of the fourteen hours of laboring were spent with an arm around each, my partner and our yogini friend, with our midwife between my legs guiding this dark-haired human out of my body.

Completion. Relief.

Total. Exhaustion.

Sitting there in a pile of medipads, blood everywhere, fluids and slime, my child all gooey and white, reaching up my belly towards my breasts, the real journey into total psyche transformation began.

Today, while Scott was up on the mountain, laboring to bring the water down, through the storm and mud and cold wet alpine terrain, opening the reservoir, clearing the ditches, walking the water down with pitch fork and shovel, I remembered our daughter’s birth.

He called me from up on the mountain, “Has the water reached our land yet?”

“Not yet,” I told him. We waited.

This will be our third summer tending this land. It has been one of the most challenging and deeply rewarding experiences of my life, for sure; one of the most becoming-human experiences of my life. I have watched the sun and cloud and snow, the mist and deer and elk, we have tended the water and watched the forests transform from desert to wetland.

This season we have been gifted the opportunity to be really involved with the water of our little ditch here at the base of Mt. Lamborn. Through this opportunity we have deepened our marriage to this place and begun to witness the incredible beauty that is the wilderness.

Hours later, when the water finally did reached our land, Scott was home, fully exhausted with mud up to his hips and in his hair, and we celebrated this deep blessing on our land and in our lives with a toast of locally made Rosé of Chambourcin.

With water comes Life.

With life comes labor.

And what a blessing it is to participate in both. We give thanks!

Thank you to all the mamas in the world, whose wisdoms and sufferings continue to carve truth-paths into the cosmos of those who come after them. May we continue to turn our ears and hearts to the mothers of the world as way showers and leaders towards a better way of life for all.

Thank you for reading.

motherseedfarm.com