The Beginningless Womb

I am sharing something I wrote for the 2022 Harvest of Voices event here in our little town last fall. It was written during a particularly challenging time in my life as a new mama, with a very new baby, a new home (with a crazy scary landlady), painstakingly creeping into the cracks of a very new life. I was experiencing the most incredible, unbelievable insomnia of my life, and it left me completely decimated, mind, body, spirit. My arms ached, my ears rang, I couldn't think straight (or at all), I felt completely alone and utterly under-resourced. And I just couldn't drop into one of the most nourishing aspects of humaning: sleep. It was generally the setting fire to everything I knew my life to be, stepping forward in life completely raw and tender, wrathfully, painfully, fully transforming into something I had never known.

And as we do as artists, I took all that pain and understanding and humbling and turned it into something beautiful, a bit of wisdom, and I wrote this piece to capture the flavor of that radical initiation.

Enjoy.

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The Beginningless Womb

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I have found myself beneath the midnight sky, as all the world sleeps, throwing offerings to the constellations and to the old living roots of the earth. I have stood alone, searching and sifting through galaxies and star clusters, trying to gather up a story that makes sense, a story that holds life as sacred. I have cried with the morning star and surrendered to the chorus of crickets at dawn. I have untangled the helpful from the diseased, the holy from the unholy, the life-giving from the life-taking. And all that I thought myself to be has crumbled to dust in the tunnel between maiden and mother and, I have allowed it. 

There’s something in the way the wild oak and rain ferment in the night that makes the sunrise smell like my ancestors and I feel them weaving riddles around my life; Tomatoes, okra, black eyed peas; the holy dogwood tree flowering over the ashes of our deceased. When the sun rises, I whisper prayers into the subtle light of the spinning earth and I smell my mother’s people. A thousand lightrays pour through the leaves of the mighty elder tree, and the next wave of ancestors sleeps in a basket in the garden.

We are carving new pathways in the forest floor for the water to run. We are using our hands. We watch the beautiful green chase the trickling stream down the mountain.

In the garden, I am gathering strength. I am anchoring sunlight in my womb where generations of healing never happened. I am anchoring earth, air, fire and water. I am balancing the past with the future in the way my love speaks through me. I am grieving the loss of something I never had. I am breaking. I am calling out to the elementals: to the spark of sunshine on oak leaf, to the echo of bird song on mountain top, to the memory of bare feet in good soil. I am calling out, calling, singing, reaching to the spaces between mothers and daughters, to the winds swept through families and lovers. I am dancing, spiral dancing, around the fractured lodge of my people and I am weeping.

The morning star leads the water. The water feeds the earth. The earth feeds her people.