"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift."
- Mary Oliver
"Never underestimate the value of time spent in the womb," my teacher Eden said to me a few years ago when I was going through a particularly hard time. "Darkness is pregnant and full of life."
I've been reflecting a lot on these words as we just passed through the winter solstice- the darkest time of the year- and also as this baby boy has now spent nine months growing inside the fertile darkness of my own body.
Seeing this pregnant picture of myself for the first time, on the land I’ve always dreamed of caring for, made me cry. The truth is, the wisdom Eden shared with me those years ago was when I was deep in my mostly silent struggle with unexplained "infertility."
While I've birthed many things in my life I'm endlessly proud of- businesses, projects, spaces for healing and community, and deeply meaningful relationships- I wasn't sure that becoming a mother in the traditional sense of the word was something I'd ever experience in this life.
I spent the last years of my 20s and first half of my 30s creating and growing a business that took everything I had in me to survive it, and then the remainder of my 30s trying to heal and recover from that experience. By the time I felt resourced enough to imagine a child in my life, modern medicine told me it was likely too late. For years, my body seemed to tell me the same. And just when it seemed it clearly wasn't meant to happen for me, suddenly, it did.
I'm reminded that just like a baby knows exactly how long to gestate, there's an often unexplainable perfection in the timing of life. Trusting how it unfolds when it feels like something else SHOULD be happening is often the hardest part (for me).
As I enter this last month of my transition from maiden to mother, I'm feeling myself deep in the waters of this liminal space I've been swimming in for 36+ weeks. I'm suspended between two worlds- no longer "here" and not quite "there." Like a caterpillar in the chrysalis transforming into a butterfly, so much of who I am, or thought I was, is dissolving away into goo. I have no idea what it's going to feel like to emerge on the other side, how I'm going to change or who I'm going to be.
And maybe that's the lesson of our biggest transformational experiences in life: you have to let yourself surrender to the duality of death and birth at the same time. Decomposing to eventually bloom. Unbecoming to become. Embracing the fertility of the darkness and going within, so you can be with with whatever wants to emerge, to be brought into the world, out into the light.
As my body and my belly expand (and expand and expaaaand), I feel my heart expanding with them to embrace a love I’m sure I’ve never known. I'm ready to meet this new baby and this new version of myself, whoever we both are. From the womb into the world outside, we will continue to grow together as I learn how to live into my own unique expression of “mother."