Such a charged word…abortion…The original definition of abortion described the arrest of the development of an organ, typically a seed or fruit. Gradually, the use of the word grew to include human pregnancy, then miscarriage started to separate out from abortion. Miscarriage was noble and abortion belonged in the gutter. Miscarriage was acknowledged and allowed while abortion went into the dark web and was held in secrecy outside protection. Somehow it is willful for an ‘intentional miscarriage’, ie removing a seed from a hostile and unfriendly, overwhelmed, and disturbed environment, but if nature rejects the environment’s ability to carry forward life it is in appearance genteel, regrettable but “no doubt, for the best” as in a miscarriage. Like the early starts missed the train. I can find myself in the camp of “what’s the difference?”
When there are two distinctive sides facing off in hostility, I like to sit with the conflict and let it roam around inside. I like to take the time to put the shoes of the conflict on and pause in the othering going on. It is here that I look often to Nature to see what she has to contribute to the dialogue. So with abortion, I allowed myself down the shadowy fallopian tubes into the core of my femininity and into the wild sacred domains of Mother Nature and the Great Mystery of being born into the body of a woman. It is in the cavernous domains of Kali and Shiva that I felt called to sit in and to listen to.
Menses, Moontime, Menstrual, Period, Curse, Rag, Crimson tide, and the euphemisms go on. Somehow sex, menstruation, and death are all taboo. In the covering up of menstrual blood, it becomes entangled with unruly holes of shame that then control excessively in order to keep the coverings on. Shhh. Keep it hidden including the tampon. Flush it silently down the toilet alongside swallowing pills for a crying womb so that you may not disturb the surface of the outer world with your deep pulsing connection to the pulse of life and death.
Let us address the blood that connects women to the cycle of life that has invoked great mystery from our early ancestral days. Bleeding without a perceived cause. A cycle often preceded by a darkness of sensation. Does woman not experiences abortion every month? The environment does not meet the criteria for creation. The seed/egg goes unanswered as it falls out of favor. Each month shiny in promise, the egg is to be rejected, unwanted and the woman feels the inevitable doom of destruction in what we call in present day, PMS.
A woman’s seed or egg is a dream, a promise, a potential. It is an integral part of natural selection that has been occurring and occurring and occurring through the corridors of ancient time. It is an eternal expression arriving out of the bowels of our Ancient Mother Earth as she dreams herself continuously. A woman’s body is the earth and moves with a wild and savage pulse outside of modern science and polite cultural views. She is the destroyer and the creator, Shiva, Kali, the cauldron of rebirth. The White Goddess of The Celts, the Crone, the destroyer, dryad of death and of life.
For the human being to rise up, acting above Nature, and to make the Earth a place that is taken from according to thought up ideas, has already proven to be dangerous, nightmarish and a dead end for human existence. A long term degeneration into the biggest abortion of them all, the sacredness of life and death. Do we protest the very thing that we need to listen to, othering out our ignorance, fear and an arrogant need to be in charge, while fear of chaos haunts our every turn? How little we westerners understand about the sacredness of our Mother’s Dream, of listening and of accepting what is Her way.
For some of us, we want choice and for others, all potential life needs to be nurtured and grown. Amongst women, I believe, we have room for all of that and everything in between. It is about the respect of each other. Since the dawn of human beings, it has been the women that midwife life in and out, holding the sacred portal with care and compassion on both ends. We carry the wisdom and knowledge in our blood of those sacred rites of passage and the medicines to ease the passages. It appears to come with the territory of being born women.
I have where I stand for myself and I am counting on my heart to be generous and spacious, to hold all women in the infinite spectrum of possibilities as to where they stand. May I respect those that safely dwell in a very different position than I and hold them in a fullness of respect. May I continue to remember that, for me, the Universe is not black and white and it is the very variety of all of us that makes up the composition of now. A composition that is sacred and not fixed. Life is in continual flow and to hold on, as in trying to stop the eggs returning back to the earth in our blood, is futile. Are we humans thinking ourselves as so powerful as to be the ones making a decision between life and death? Is it possible it is a story we make up within a universe of fate and karma and a need to feel in control?. Now there is the Mystery, the sacred “not knowing” and the acceptance of another’s decision without inflicting this “other” with one’s own.
May all women find that kernel of truth within their seed and stand up in the reflection of many facets of our Mother. We are part of the spirit of the feminine, every human being, not just women. The natural world of our Mother shows us that diversity creates and supports life, either/or leads to exclusion and death. Let us join hands in the streets and rise up in the beauty of all the ways we can affirm life together in the beyond of right and wrong. There is no “other” only an us.
Photo Credit: Jenn Whitney