How
How did I get to here?
UNORTHODOX BIRTH
There is nothing like
birthing a soul
into the world
to teach you
about the delicate
balance
between
life and death
being alone
and entirely unalone
Made it to 9cm
with little more support
than an occasional
breathing
ever so lightly
upon mine neck
no one could help me
but me
through all that
I’d never been there
before
I was just doing
what my body
and soul
knew to do
‘twas my mind alone
that questioned my self
if I had it in me
I didn’t realize
how far I’d made it
all on my own
until it came time
thinking I had
a much longer marathon
ahead of me
than what was reality
the best news of my life
fore I knew in that moment
I had it in me
and more
She felt bad
for having not been there
but my body
didn’t follow
any of the rules
go figure
so none of us knew
When it came time
for pushing
then
I wasn’t alone
inside
or
outside
that surrendering
that moment
determinate between
my own ring of fire
and the back cracking
pressure
coming through me
no drugs
not one
to rely on
to ease it
didn’t even want one
not even in that moment
not once I knew
where I’d made it to
I wanted to
experience
all of it
I wanted to know
my strength
I wanted to know
the strength
of all women
that’d come
before me
and that surrendering
that surrendering
there is nothing else
quite like it
A glimpse into my backstory. The story of my homebirth. One of many moments when life schooled me truly in what it was I was made of in terms of grit and resiliency. I honestly thought my midwife was going to tell me I was only at a few centimeters when she got there. That that whole night of pain I’d been through was barely just the beginning of the pains of labor. The humility with that internal reckoning questioning if I’d have more in me to get through if that was so. The relief when I processed how far I’d made it mostly all from within. A glimmer of wonder shimmered inside, though I had not the time to reflect upon it in that precise moment.
The chapter of life leading up to it and what it would ultimately come to be seen as having been in my life. The whole of an era I am now closing the pages on personally. Me well on my way learning to mostly need nobody. Not because it was what I wanted, but because it is what happened to me. The irony of someone who once so devotionally cherished and loved community. Someone for whom synchronicities of untold magnitudes and awe inspiring mystery had also resulted in me intimately spending time with pivotal company in Indian Country on far more than one occasion. It’s humbling, to say the least, to reflect upon where it is I’ve been.
Meetings of sacred energies in what would also become a mixology of blessing and curse for me.
Having said that, it all fell apart for me. Near all relations in life for me. Not because of material attachment thinking or some devastation of world view fragility. I’d lived in cheap vans for near three years of my life already, and had intimately witnessed both ecological and social and class devastations prior. Rather, paralleling the perfect clashing of amalgamations of shadows costing me near everything. Interiorly and with both settler and indigenous. My lived inheritance is anything but the typical mythos or projection of what it means to be an American of European descent in this land.
Now seen, nevertheless, so too is the sharpened acuity of it all something that can never be unseen. I now walk in this world mundanely mostly alone for the time being. Gutted of the local life I thought I was working towards, however, a much richer potential slowly came into view. Sometimes where we are is truly not where we are meant to be.
As all arduous processes teach the willing, beauty of the mystery unfolded as too revealing itself within me. No longer something I simply saw as existing outside of me and that I could passionately relate to anymore.
I didn’t mean to awaken to ancestry. It happened to me. It came through me.
Though hindsight, it had been slowly building from within, so obviously, my entire life. Growing up in a landscape that ceaselessly encultured me away from it. Little did I know the sum of work and trials, depths and layers, I would traverse through, were in whole preparing me for a home coming I could never have in my life dreamed into being all on my own.
Over a decade ago in the earlier stages of what I would now summate as my own journey towards bioregional awareness development interiorly, I heard that first deliberate call, calling me home. I had a dream of a book. Showing me in such a playful and laughable way, my way within. The sacred is always playful with me. Lovingly. My whole life has it been. It’s how I know integrity with the sacred as guardian or compass or loving from other energies that would not want well for me when it is in presence through a particular moment that we meet.
The dreaming of that book shaking my foundation regardless, in a time when I believed something very different about where it is I was from or should be relationally moving towards, or why that book was selectively even coming to me. Long before I much thought about home or heritage at all. Practically and esoterically, against all logic that had been, was being, would be, fed to me.
In all honesty, I was simply a wild child of a woman that ran around in the woods mostly unseen and unnoticed. I’d even progressed to most outdoor adventures spent wild foraging or scouting for such moments, learning intimately the watershed and ecology where it is I was through the years and seasons. Which is to say, I’d walked away from the well-trodden paths that many years of solo backpacking and then rock climbing had previously led me down.
The wild feminine was vividly activated within me. How hard the call to faith can be for some to answer. For stubborn souls like me.
It took falling down and being seemingly broken, to make more room for me, however. Prior to it, doubt plagued me. Doubt that I should be pursuing even a different life than the one that presented itself right in front of me that I was in. But something slow and steady, unknowingly perhaps, broke that down for me. Helping me make room for me to see what was always becoming within me.
All the love that filled my life prior and was attracted to me through those inquiries, and my goodness was I blessed, it truly did have to burn away. I never would have made a leap in this way otherwise. Heart wide open, yet with the lived experiences for knowing the need for fierceness with protecting it. One’s own heart ecology. For even having etched out the reaches into such layers. The reasons why, I can only know my own part in the fray. Where I was, however, I can say, wasn’t where I was meant to stay. Or my life wouldn’t have fallen apart how it did, would it have?
Faith is not the same thing as trusting in the unknown.
But deep in the shadowy depths of working through my own throes with mental health challenges, having laid it all out in plain sight via creative writing and poetry along the way, all of which landed nowhere, exacerbating the degrees of isolation and my own struggles with absolute failure and loss, somewhere there in it all, I returned to myself, in a radically different way. From out of the ashes and disintegration of too many deaths for counting, remembrance gifted me everything I could need.
Looking back over the works that got me to here, six books that all landed with endless waves of silence, they really were all confession, testimony, endurance, and prayer. As all creative works are ultimately. I see my poetry works released prior as mostly war files with my own mind coming into presence with both individuation and the collective shadow simultaneously. Little more and little less. In that nobody much resonated with my expressions throughout any of those years but revealed in that end more of me to me.
Sometimes, to seemingly lose everything, gifts us everything the same, albeit differently. To swim where madmen drown and to make it to shore and renewal mostly on one’s own, there’s a gratitude that can’t be bought or paid for. Life answered my prayers that had been arising in me, unbeknownst to me, my whole life, in ways I never could have anticipated. And I am freed to need nobody. Not even do I have at present a friend to sit with for hours on end and reflect upon all the beauty that is, with. But I no longer think that’s where my story either ends.