Birthing Soul

Plant wisdom

As much as I like the color green, it's clear I do not have a "green thumb." Unfortunately my gardening mother didn't pass that down to me in her genetic donation. Maybe I only need a few lessons and a good dose of fertilizer, but it seems the only plants I can keep alive are those tropical vines that are so hearty you could freeze them or leave them for a week and they still manage to hang on.

I am trying my hand at tomatos this year - though my mother planted them for me as a birthday present. They are sitting outside on my porch looking withered in the summer morning sunlight. My mother tells me tomatos need to be stressed in order to produce fruit. Well, if that's the case, it looks like they will be producing plenty! (Hmm, is there a life lesson nestled in there?!)

So I also tried my hand at some aloe vera plants. In our household we call them "Mr. Plant" and treat them with respect. We use his medicine on everything from burns to scrapes, chicken pox and invisible owies - he truly is a magical creature. Naming him also seems to help keep the three-year-olds from pulling them up by the roots repeatedly - as was the case in the beginning. Surprisingly, that first plant is somehow holding onto life.

The other two aren't doing so well. I had gotten a couple more from my mother's place and transplanted them into a new pot. No matter how much I watered them, or didn't water them, or left them in the sunlight or in the shade (I tried everything), they have since lost all vitality and withered away into sad, drooping, empty arms, some dried up completely and others holding on to a bit of life, still half-firm with a sad bit of the gooey life-gel inside.

But what was interesting to me (other than my lack of ability with plants), was that out of the drooping, withered and dying plant sprang beautiful, tender, green shoots of baby aloe plants from the dying one's roots. I realize that this is how these plants reproduce, but it still seemed to hold a metaphor to a deeper life truth: out of death comes life. And sometimes the old needs to die away to give nourisment and way for the new to come forth.

So next time I'm feeling stressed and wilted I'll remember my tomato plants that only bring fruit after stress. And when I'm grieving the dying parts of my life, I'll remember the new life springing from the dying aloe's roots, and in the midst of death look for the vibrant, firm shoots of new life sprouting out of me.

Maybe I should learn more about this gardening thing. There seems to be a lot of wisdom hidden in these little plants.

Offering to the Underworld

Tamu dubi. My sweet bear - it was the Swahili nickname he had engraved on the handmade ring he made me out of black Tanzanian ebony when we were starry-eyed teenagers. The ring of first love, made with so much tenderness, so much hope, worn and tattered and cracked by years of loyal wear.

I brought it out of my collection of memories and treasures, holding it fondly, slipping its smooth roundness on and off of my fingers. I didn't realize that this worn ring, and everything it symbolized would play a monumental role in my own personal transformation.

It hurt. Tears tugged at my eyelids, begging to course down my cheeks every time I thought about it. We were asked to do a ritual, putting something of importance down into a dugout hole in the earth, symbolizing our intention to descend into the underworld. I knew it was to be this ring. Every time I thought about it, some part of me wanted to break down in rivers of tears - wanted NOT to do it, wanted to find something else, something with less emotional weight.

It was the only thing I had left, and I realized a part of me still clung to it. He is gone, the relationship is shattered along with all the hopes and dreams we shared. And I felt shattered. It was the ring of my first love. The ring of my best friend. We were going to change the world together, grow old together. But just like I unintentionally cracked the ring, I had unintentionally cracked that dream too.

Tears flowed hard and unabashed as I walked down to the portal hole. I missed my first love. I missed the safety. I missed my other half. I missed my best friend. I missed him. I missed knowing what to expect from life, knowing where I was going. I missed feeling protected from the life's buffeting storms.

But it was fitting that I put his ring into the portal to the underworld. It was from the safety of his arms that I was plunged into my own underworld. And in a way he traveled there with me, through all the agonizing heart-pain of betrayal and shattered dreams, it was his underworld journey too. In a way he and I were still connected, him somehow a part of the deep symbolic language and fabric of my psyche.

So, with tears and trembling, as a sacrifice and a memorial - to honor him, to honor his place in my life, to honor the pain-filled story that would become my own personal myth - I offered his ring to the underworld. The overwhelming symbol of my first adulthood - and its death. I offered the gift and sacrifice of myself, my hopes and dreams to the door of death... In the hopes of one day, a rebirth.

I spent the next 5 days in nature, surrounded by wildness mirroring my own wild soul. I walked sometimes courageously, sometimes full of dread into the land of shadows and death, spending afternoons ankle-deep in fertile, primal muck. Spending time in pitch darkness at the bottom of a swampy gulch, watching as my own projections attacked me from all sides in stereo clarity. I spent time dying and making peace, and then dying some more. My muck was calling me, beckoning me with every step to dissolve into it, back into the fertile, primal source of life and death and rebirth.

And so I gave myself to it, to the process that had begun so many years ago, the process of dying and disintegrating. I honored it. I intensified it. I dove head first into psycho-spiritual darkness, my psycho-spiritual muck, teaming and vibrant with deathgiving power and lifegiving vitality.

When it came time to do the final ceremony, to retrieve the item placed in the portal, I walked with a lightness I had not felt in years. As if all the gunked-up emotionally toxic waste that had been clinging to the crevasses and corners of my heart had been run through with a raging river of cleansing water. Sometimes that steady stream of tears that emanate from the depths have the same effect as a raging river.

I found the ring in the hole without much trouble, and held it with fondness one last time - slipping it on and off my fingers. Looking at the crack in the wood. Loving and appreciating all the memories and even the heart-wrenching pain it symbolized. Appreciating the part it played, the part he played in the mythic story of my life.  And in one last symbolic gesture of death, I dropped it back into the earth to be reclaimed.

And so I celebrated and honored death, and yet transformation continues. Rebirth is also a process, one that I will dive into just as passionately. This is my mythic story; one that I wouldn't change for the world.

The Art of Death Midwifery

MP3 File   Length-51 minutes, 12 seconds

Ms. Janette Merrill, host of Birthing Soul, interviews Dr. Joellyn St. Pierre about the art of death midwifery.

Dr. Joellyn St. Pierre is an ordained interfaith minister with a doctorate in divinity focused on Death as a Transition. Previously and for 25 years, she enjoyed a professional career in theatre with 7 Broadway shows under her belt, including “A Chorus Line,” and “Pippin.”  Visit her website.

Creatura: archetype of a roaring belly goddess

There is a force that lies deep within a woman. A raw, instinctual, chthonic creature with a guttural, reverberating voice. A force often subdued by culture and the fears of men because of the raw instinctual power she possesses. This primal Creatura can be found in the bowels of the earth, in deep caves and mucky places. She can be found in the depths of the ocean. Anywhere you hear a deep rumble or groan, a cry that reverberates from deeper than deep, that's her voice. And she is found all around you, in the dark inner recesses of women in whom she is awakened.

Hers is a primal force that comes out of the gut, but deeper. Out of the center depth of a woman's being, out of the uterus of her psyche. She is a life-force, she is a death-force. She is the force that literally possesses a woman in natural childbirth as cries and pushings and groanings emanate from the mother's core. She is the primal force that watches over tender budding life and then takes over the mother's whole being, banishing the little one from the depths with rhythmic, rumbling deep-ocean-like waves of power. Bringing both mother and child ever so close to the momentarily thinned veil separating death and life.  She is there as the blood supply is severed and death hovers ready to clench its icy jaws, while little cells scream out for life giving oxygen. And she is there as the new air that fills the lungs for the first time with raw vibrant force, and the first cries of the newborn reverberate throughout the room.

The Creatura stirs when sexuality begins to awaken. She flickers open a dragon-like eye when the first days of blood appear and a yearning and primal cry ache from deep within. She is coaxed to a dark, powerful life by adept fingers who call forth groans that emanate from the depths of her primal being. You can hear her same powerful voice in the roar of an earthquake as it rumbles through the bowels of the earth, or in the power of the sea as it surges and breaks forth from the dark depths below.

Clean, protected and cultured women may sense her primal flicker, even feel her power in these fleeting encounters. But Creatura cannot be summoned from the mountaintops, or from the sunny days of innocence, or from tropical landscapes of leisure. It's only in the mucky, dark and painful journey through the underworld where one faces dismemberment and the transforming power of death, that chthonic Creatura is evoked in all her power, passion and vibrancy.

The same power that banishes the baby from the safety of the dreamlike womb also banishes the woman from the protected womb of childhood, the state of unconscious naivete, plunging her into a dark initiation. She brings her down into a land of shadows, demons and predators where they serve as mirrors to her psyche. The descent through the second birth canal can be crushing, dark and overwhelming, but just as in birth, Creatura is hovering rhythmically, carefully guarding the process. Waiting until just the right moment, when the pain seems so great, the tormentors so strong, and the darkness too engulfing, she erupts from the belly of a woman with a guttural roar, a cry that shakes the underworld.  And the woman is born.  Creatura has awakened within her: a razor toothed, chthonic, crocodile creature in her core.

This roaring belly goddess is dirty and caked in clay and mud but incredibly powerful; her tail taking down trees, her mouth shattering bones. She is cyclical, rhythmic, orgasmic. She is birth pangs and grief groans and the rage that erupts from the deep at abuse and injustice. She is life and death and the power of rebirth.

She is not a rational, keen or cutting force like that which is centered in the mind. She is not the light, generous and giving force that emanates out of the heart. She is dark, instinctual, mucky and vibrant. She is primal. She is the power you have in you as a woman. She may be dormant but she is there in every birthing and transformative process a woman goes through. She may lurking in the deep with half opened eyes, but once she is awakened, and indeed she will awaken, nothing will stand in her way.

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The spectrum of life

The moon wanes into darkness as the faintest inklings of spring peek from behind a shroud of frosty greyness. The cycles of the earth juxtaposed against each other, one a decline into death, the other a birthing into life, both striking powerful chords within me. My own body is animated with the dark energies of my own new moon and I feel deep reverberations of the dark goddess within me.  Shedding the hope of the fertile phase and relishing her own destructive force, my body exudes a Kali-esque power. But the energies of death and destruction are far from lifeless; they are very much alive, pulsing with a primal darkness. The kind of darkness you find in the fertile black earth; a darkness imbued with anticipation, a death that is already reverberating with life.

It's almost as if the cycle of life and death and the energy and power associated with it manifests itself as a continuum, similar to the spectrum of light. The parts of the spectrum we can see, we associate with light, and therefore with life. This is the bright, topside world, thriving with spring and summertime vitality. But as you near the end of visible light, it's not that light ceases to exist. We just can't see it with our normal eyes. In a similar way, the death aspect of any cycle, far from being dead, is pulsing with a different aspect of the spectrum of life. A dark and powerful energy that is more felt than seen.

And then the colors of each cycle - whether springtime green, or summertime blue, or autumn clothed in vibrant oranges and red - interact and play on all the other cycles we are experiencing at that moment like overlapping circles of light. Each cycle - be it the seasons, or the moon, or our own inner cycle - adds its own unique and vibrant signature to the mix. Brilliant life delicately dances with resonating death causing a most magnificent light show to those with eyes to see its beauty.

So as the moon wanes into her dark phase and spring tentatively begins her crescendo of life, as my body weaves her own cycles into the fabric of time, I will just be in this moment, with all the colors of life swirling around me. They say Life is beautiful. Indeed it is!

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Psyche's underworld

Life is replete, fraught with ups and downs. Dark emotions draw you down into the underworld of the psyche to incubate, marinade, to just be - inside yourself. Only to be drawn back up again to the topside world by laughter and giggles of little ones begging for kisses on their necks before nap. The stress of frantically chasing 2 year olds in the bookstore as they hide and seek from me melts as we walk out into a warm summer downpour hand in hand in hand. Drenched in our summer clothes, sparkling water dripping down our bare shoulders. But happy.

 

Life is full of the cycle of birth and growth, of culmination, fullness and fertility. Only to move into the cycle of decline and eventual death. The incubation of darkness. The underside of things. We see it on the grand scale of our life: the journey from birth to death. We see it yearly as the seasons weave their way through time. Even monthly we see it happen as the moon moves methodically through her phases. Who's to say we don't see it every day, on a smaller level. The cycling of emotions and feelings. Not so much the roller coaster of drama and tragedy, but the normal ups and downs that we go through.

 

It's time to embrace this entire process. Not just the beautiful spring and summer times of the soul, but the dark times as well. The times we run from. The darkness that we pump ourselves full of antidepressants or addictive soul-numbing substances to avoid. No, it's time to quit running and embrace even the darkness.

 

Where you go down into the dark and heavy place. Down, down into the core of your soul. The underworld. The underside of things where reality is flipped, or maybe it's more real. You see with different eyes. You feel with different receptors. Down into that place where you cease to do, or to analyze, or to think... you just are. You just be.

 

You sit and dine with the daemons. Anger. Betrayal. Pain. Rejection. Abandoned. Alone. You embrace the shadowy things, the parts you can't see from the topside. The feelings, sensations, emotions feel heavy, they draw you down. It's your soul's beckoning to come commune in the darkness. Where death and pain aren't something to be feared but embraced.

 

And as you go down into the core of your being, into the depths, you face the skeletons that lay at the floor, hang on the walls... you face the demons that fly passed; hovering, flitting, swarming around you, for this is their lair. You look at death in the face and instead of running in terror, you crawl inside it like a dark, warm womb. And you incubate, you feel, you just be... and wait for the moment of rebirth. For it is only in embracing death that new life can form.

 

And then sometimes without even knowing it, you are propelled back out to the topside world. Maybe there's an explosion of golden sparkles that erupt and shower around you. But more often than not, it happens in a simple moment, an instant without any fanfare at all. Sometimes there's a longer laboring process, intense and painful in itself, where you and the primal force of Life, work together with contractions, pushings and groanings, squishings and squeezings until you are propelled from the dark womb. Reborn.

 

However it happens, once you emerge the world looks a bit different. You are a bit different. In the midst of death, you've touched a bit more of Soul, of the substance of life, and in so doing, bring it back with you. A sort of gift from the underworld. A diamond, or ruby, or sapphire that is only found inside the depths, down in the darkness.

 

Life in the upper world indeed is beautiful. Spring rainbows...summer showers and girlie giggles warm the heart. But the essence of life is found down below, in the cold, dark wintry places. Without going down, we can never truly enjoy the beauty. And without death, there will never be new life.

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