Birthing Soul

Sundrops and moonbeams

I sit in my corner; my thinking corner; my reading corner in my worn blue rocking chair. Autumn sunshine and a rare blue October sky drench me through the cornered window panes with streams of warm autumnness. The last of the remaining yellow leaves rustle crisply in the strangely warm air, dangling on near naked branches.

I take a break from my book and my thoughts to drink in the beautiful feeling... I watch the way the sunlight happily dances on my skin, how it makes it shimmer like a thousand tiny rainbows, how it whispers and twinkles through my hair till it shines like spun gold.

Yes, in the sunshine I feel invigorated. Even while all of nature around is cycling into her graceful death-dance, I am at peace, fully alive. Sure, I'll cycle with her as the days grow painfully short, and as the last vibrant show of radiant leaves and brilliant fall colors fade into months of mucky greyness. But today, I drink in the last burst of life, savoring the sun drenched moment.

The full moon rises tonight through my corner windows, leaving my room - and my corner - glistening with a soft silvery glow. My little ones wave goodnight to La Luna, wishing they could touch her, but instead settle for blowing kisses.

Not everything is best seen in the brilliant light of the sun. Some things, the underside of things need the shadowy, soft light of a moon drenched window. And still other things need the drizzle of a gray morning, or the raw power of a dark stormy night.

So I'll let my soul dance with the changing of the seasons in the graceful dance of death, through the sun splashed shortening October days, through the moonlit nights, through the crunchy leaves that smell like childhood wonder. And I'll dance into days of drizzle and darkness to see things that are only visible in shrouds of gray.

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Birth Spots

Change is good, though it's not always easy. In my brief hiatus of non-compter life I impulsively decided to move. In a place where I crave changes of all kinds, I felt that I deeply needed the physical and psychological de-cluttering that comes with moving.

After nearly three years of being in the same place, not to mention a doubling of my family size, I had accumulated an ungodly amount of clutter. So in the days preceeding the move, I went through the corners and closets and piles of hidden and repressed memories and memoirs. Some good, some nostalgic - like loose baby photos of the twins, or their premie clothes long grown out of. But other corners stirred up memory dust laced with toxic shame, guilt and sadness. Skeletons I purposely placed in closets because I didn't really want to face them.

Belongings have a way of attaching themselves to you. Most things I either gave away, or threw away, all with different measures of guilt. Books from my previous life that had little relevance to me now. All in all I tossed at least a dumpster and a half full of stuff... and gave away another dumpster full. I purged ruthlessly in some sort of difficult theraputic act.

The one thing I lost that had the greatest emotional power for me were my birth spots. The places on my living room floor where I could proudly point to and say, "that's where Naya was born"... and "over there is where Eliya was born nearly 6 hours later." The places on my living room floor where not only were my two precious princesses came into the world, but where a part of me was birthed as well.

But after it's all said and done, and I'm settling into my new place, I am doing ok without my birth spots. And definitely doing wonderfully without all the extra clutter and psychological distress of looking in every direction and not knowing what to clean (and so not cleaning anything).

I've actually dreamed every night since moving in - a pretty rare occurance in my world. Even in my dream group last year I'd be lucky to have a dream every couple weeks, and now I'm dreaming vividly, sometimes multiple times a night for nearly two weeks.

I feel good, cleansed somehow. Purged. Sure I still have those pangs of guilt wondering if I should have given those books back to my ex-husband instead of to the salvation army... as if giving him back the books would somehow give him back something he lost (me, his daughter, his life he had so perfectly planned out) and fix all the pain I inadvertantly caused in my path to becoming me. But I knew the books would be little consolation.

But the blowing of the crisp autumn wind through all the corners of my mind-house, purging the toxic dust, disturbing the spiders and animalitos that had nested in the cluttered, undisturbed darkness was carthartic.

And now I have a new place, to make new memories in. And birth spots have turned into two lively two-and-a-half-year-olds stampeding through the hallways, bouncing on beds, and fighting over whose mommy I am (my mommy, no MY mommy!). And a rich dreamlife... and even a new computer. Not to mention a clean and clutterless house. How much better can life get :).

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