The prayer was exquisite for Koa this last sat night. I am soo greatful to his spirit of life..he just holds such beauty and ease in his presence. Thank you to my ceremonial prayer family who came and sat with us and helped us mark this immense journey of four seasons into our loss of Koa in body. In the morning time of the all night ceremony I announced to Banyan and to the community that we are PREGNANT. Six weeks. so now you all know. New life is forming in our family and we will now hold death an life simultaneously. I dont have words right now but I wanted to share a writing I did just after finding out about the new baby....I share it because i feel it speaks to the threshold I am standing on. A place that speaks to expanding to hold all of life . Deep DEEp gratitude..Immense deep gratitude to you all. Love v I AM A LIVING SHRINE I sit and hear the doves singing their song outside.. the crickets accompany along with the occasion mysterious bird chirping and the distant sound of the creek in the background. There so much life in this world. So many living things. They all have their sounds, their habitats, their purposes, their alchemy within the greater tapestry of life. The thing I am most aware of is the mystery of how they all got here. How each species came to be. How each living breathing entity knows where to go to get their nutrients for survival, how to find its way back to the home it belongs to or how to protect itself from imminent dangers. I suppose with each question asked out into the world I have one that is asked of myself internally. What are my sounds, my habitat, my purpose, my alchemy and how do I fit into the great tapestry of life? How did I get here, how did I come to be, where do I get my nutrients from and how do I protect myself from imminent danger. I suppose its not the answers I am learning to find but rather I am learning to live the questions. Answers seem to final for a life like mine and if I had them I don’t think I would even know how to trust them. I have now seen way too much of this life to think about answers. I am now leaning deeply into the understanding that there are many answers and even more people who think they have them and that indeed answers are so changeable according to mood outlook, perceptions and projections. The dictionary describes an answer as “A thing said, written, or done to deal with or as a reaction to a question, statement, or situation.” It appears I am starting to understand that “dealing with” and “reacting” are ineffective responses to a very mysterious and unanswerable life. I am now approaching the last days of the fourth season since my sons passing. This has been the most challenging year of my life on all levels. I have grown immensely, shattered illusions that I clung to for dear life, been stripped of all of my own ideas and plans, surpassed my human ability to express pain, faced disenigration only to be met with more life, lived with an unquenchable un-survivable yearning, and learn how to “see” in the darkest of darkness. I have lived days where I could not smell the smells of life, nor hear the sounds of any wondrous creature nor even sleep long enough to dream. Food lost its taste, and all looked at turned to pain. Days where anything I touched reminded me I was dying and I couldn’t even bear the skin of another close to mine. My face, my hair, my pillow and the earth below me soaked with daily tear and my body sweating though my clothes day and night from the lifes fire burning me from within. I could stand in a room of others and not even know they were there. I could respond to my life but hovered about 5 ft above my body at all times. Most days’ time stood still as did my hope that I would ever feel any other emotion besides grief. Air felt painful to breathe in and the sun and rain passed though me as if I were invisible or not worthy of touching. Survivng the loss of my child will never be a happy thing. I will never find a place were I have an answer of why he had to go. I now know that my healing takes place in living the question and perhaps an even deeper healing comes when I am able to stop even asking the question. My life is shifting now as the last days of this spring season find its way though my timeline. For most spring is a time to plant their garden and rejoice in the sunshine returning to warm the earth. For me and my family, this year, it is a painful reminder of the last days we were able to spend with our beloved Koa by our side. This time last year we had just returned form a family retreat at Britenbush. Hiking, soaking, chanting with Benji Werthimer and lost of laughing and playing. Strange how just a few days down the road from that magnificent trip I would be walking out of the emergency room without my child. Forever gone. So many teaching came to our family this year about not making any major decisions in the first year after loss. I understand now why that is so. The first and most apparent is that your not even in your body for most of the first year. The second being that once you do land in your body you have to live with the decisions you made. We chose this year to stay in our home, to exercise, to eat well, to cry, face into the pure flame of the pain, to stay married, stay close and wait. Just wait for something else to come and have mercy on us. Faith told us that within this great human existence lye’s the balance of all things. That birth and death are silent allies and that joy is the balance to pain and suffering. That within the dark is the light and that within this great loss new life would come. It hardly seemed believable. The only options seemed to be to believe it or die myself. I chose life. Waiting. Sometimes silently screaming, sometimes earth shattering roars passed the time as I just waited and stood in the flames. A new seed has now been planted. Life’s promise has taken hold in my womb space. I am now a vessel for both life and death. When Andrew and I made this child I could feel the stars and the heavens in my body. In my mind I went on a spiritual journey to the ban of stars scattered across the deep night sky and opened my body to one of them. There was an immense expansion inside where I was agreeing to the heavens that I was willing to carry its seed of light within. It was the same feeling I had when Banyan entered my womb space. The days to follow were not confirmed pregnant but I could feel all of the sudden that I was not alone anymore. As the days grew on and the nausea grew stronger I began to understand my life, in one moment, once again, had just taken a sharp turn. Most days in grief really feel a lot like the other. Dull, sad, dazed with a splash of life and a lot of internal struggle that finds its way into outward expressions like deep crys, yelling and pleading for help. The day Koa died started as any normal day in our home would yet that Sunday June 10th my whole existence, my life path, that which I would spend my life focused on changed forever. A few days into the nausea I took out the pregnancy test and low and behold another day where my old life became something of the past and the new story began to unfold. I could immediately feel that this child would never take the place of my sweet boy. It wasn’t him re-incarnate nor would it cure my grief. It was a journey that would now ask me to hold both life and death simultaneously. In our culture we push death away so deeply into the backgrounds of our life. One might even feel sad that I am living such deep grief alongside carrying new life. To me it is the perfect balance of a true existence. Light and dark always exist with one another and one is the promise of the other. Light and dark are brother and sister as this baby and Koa will also always be siblings. I don’t know that I have worked out all of my philosophies about where we go when we die or where we come from when we come into form but I do have moments where I realize that Koa and his little sibling spent some time together on the other side of the veil before this little one came to be. The morning I let in the reality of being pregnant I felt an immense destiny inside of my body taking place. This child was meant to be. I could picture koa standing there in spirit form giggling with his hands over his mouth…with deep joy saying “teehee”. See mom I told you it would be ok. This is the one I told you about. That night I had perhaps my truest and most vivid visitation from Koa. I was half awake and half asleep and he came to me and lay across my body in a cradle position in my arms. I looked at him and began to say to myself this is only a dream. I then stopped myself as it was just too real and I said “wait” he’s here, what do you want to tell him? I looked at him deeply and I put my hand on his heart while holding him so tight and said to him “Mama really really misses you koa, I love you soooo very much and I miss you”. The words were simple and the feeling emanating between us was immense, profound and beautiful. It felt more pure than any earthly moment of love we had. This moment was supported by the magic of heaven, some sort of sorcery was present. In the dream my milk began to drip out of my breast and he went to put his mouth there only he wasn’t in form so the milk just dripped and his mouth couldn’t encompass my nipple to catch it. We both just began to giggle as if it were a moment of acceptance on both our parts that he was a spirit now and could not nurse. The dream faded and I awoke for the day knowing for the first time beyond a shadow of a doubt that I had just spent time with my boy. I also awoke knowing that my journey was to parent all three of these little beings ,Banyan in a “full on” 7 yr old boy body and Koa in a ascended spirit body and this new little baby inside , a tiny cell of life, a spirit taking life form. Mothering is not what I thought it was going to be. It is soo much more than I ever could have imagined. I only had laid out the plan for having my two boys, close in age and brothers to the end. Well creator had different plans for this mother. I am a mother who dances through the realms of existence, a mother to many forms of life. I pray this baby holds and comes into existence here in our family. I also allow for its path, whatever that may be and agree to hold this mother space for it to fulfill its own destiny. I do know that it is a miracle child as I was surely done having children after koa was born. If Koa would have stayed here on this earthy plane I would not have been pregnant again. This child is its own dream coming into form. There is a strong contractual feeling pulsing through me saying...I was meant to be all along!! I now walk forward doing the magnificent, expansive and sometimes unglamorous sacred work of mothering a new life. I open my body and my soul to love again in the deep and profound ways a mother loves her children. I invite my body to hold this pregnancy and agree on all levels to the journey at hand. Some might think this is and answer to my prayers but again Answers Are defined as A thing said, written, or done to deal with or as a reaction to a question, statement, or situation. This child is a blessed question. A question that is now asking “ can you hold life and death together”? do you see how beautifully powerful you are? Life giver, midwife to death. She who went on a profound journey into he underworld and came back with a seed in her belly. She who will give birth to a god or goddess according to mythology. These days I am feeling the full use of my human life. With the fullest spectrum of human emotions possible coursing through my veins, my arms open to both death and birth, my heart broken open now with a deep bright light shining through from my womb I am nothing short of a living shrine. Blessings, v
Posted on: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:52:44 +0000
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