When we decided that we wanted to conceive, I turned to the wisdom and guidance of the trees to help me on my way. I longed for a ritual practice that my own western culture has forgotten, and so I forged an open ritual of my own to help us in calling in our child from the other side.
Cultures that are more connected to the cycles of nature, the land, and the cosmos, understand the importance of ritual and ceremony during pivotal moments in life. In ceremony, one’s resources are gathered, and intentional action begins to psychologically and spiritually prepare the participants to transform. Much of our ritual today is a shadow of what it was, hollow practices that no longer serve to transform. When ritual is alive, it takes one out of the world of the ordinary, and into the extraordinary, into the sublime. Ritual reveals to us the sacred potential of who we are, and what we can be. This is the seed of its profound power and importance, an importance that was buried in our culture long ago.
For this ritual, I began by going out into the park, where I found a beautiful mother tree. You know a tree is a mother tree when she is in the center of a tree circle, and there is a grouping of smaller trees surrounding her. As the mother, her roots dig deep and feed into all the other trees around her, nourishing them as a mother does her own baby.
Our Mother Tree in Prospect Park, Brooklyn
When I found this great mother tree, I prayed to her and asked her to help me call in our child, and to teach me how to be a great mother, like her. I asked to be her student. During this time, every day I would go and sit with her roots, under her massive canopy, in silence. The canopy was beautiful and big and full of stories. Some branches were strong and winding, others were more narrow and straight. And then there was one very large branch that had been severed, almost as if it had been struck by lightening. The gaping wound where the branch had split was healed over, and the mother tree endured.
Through her branches, I would reach my consciousness up into the ethers and call for our child to come to us. I would tell him that we longed to meet him, that we loved him already, and that we were ready to make a life with him. I asked the tree to make me ready; to till the soil of my body and soul, to help me to become the mother I yearned to be. I also spent some time filling myself up with the feeling of already being all of this, so that in the center of my bones, I felt and knew deeply that all of this not only was going to happen in the future, but was happening now, in our very present.
As fate would have it, we conceived immediately. We conceived so quickly that we barely had time to prepare ourselves. We did not actually expect this to happen instantly, as we had seen so many of our friends struggle with fertility and conception.
But there we were. We made our way almost entirely through the first trimester, initially in shock, then excitement, fear, and joy. We were getting ready.
It was at my 10-week appointment that I went in to the doctor for our first ultrasound. I was alone, as Jeremy was in Japan working on his next film. At 10 weeks, you are nearing the end of that deep uncertainty of the first trimester. The pregnancy is becoming more and more real. We were feeling assured.
But this pregnancy was not to be. When the doctor told me that the embryo had stopped growing somewhere around 8 weeks, my heart sank immediately into despair. It was a dark and rainy day, and alone I wept for the child that was not to be born to us. It was a sorrow that I had not fully known before. We were devastated.
Of course I read all about how common this is. As I spoke to more and more women about it, I began to marvel at the number of women, mothers, who had gone through this once, twice, three times. I wondered at how little it was talked about, how little we speak of miscarriage, and yet how many women I directly knew who had gone through this, another silent and deep sorrow for women to bear. But I also heard the stories of how many women went on to conceive after such an experience. And this gave me hope.
And so I returned to my mother tree and I wept to her. I asked her to help me digest my sorrow. I took in her great canopy, her mother arms, her thick trunk. I touched her roots that surrounded my body. I saw her great broken limb and branches that, like me, had seen much.
I am not one who says that everything happens for a reason. I believe in Karma, but I also believe that its’ patterns are far beyond our comprehension. How can it not be? The amount of needless suffering of the innocent in this world is completely overwhelming. The world that we live in often feels without justice.
But, we can make meaning out of our experiences, or not. We can choose to have our trauma, our pain, serve a higher good for ourselves and for all, or fall into despair. It is not easy; I struggle with this every day.
But as I sat and wept under my mother tree, I felt her pain as well. It is the pain of a mother whose children had forgotten her. The pain of a mother who wants to teach us so much, and yet her wisdom often falls on our deaf ears. How much of her wisdom have we buried, how much of it have we forgotten? How much of her great knowledge have we replaced with nothing?
As my heart erupted open by the suffering of my own loss, I felt, too, the suffering of the world’s loss. The suffering of our earth mother and all that we have done to abandon her. I realized, in some way, that to be a mother is to love greatly, and to love greatly in this world is to suffer greatly. These things are intertwined, two halves of the same leaf.
I returned to the tree with Jeremy, to close the circle of that experience together in ceremony. We circled our tree three times. We offered a semi-precious stone that had been carved into the form of an egg, and placed it into a deep crevice of the tree. We thanked her for all the wisdom that had been bestowed upon us. We asked her to help us not repeat the wounds of our ancestors, our mothers and fathers and theirs as well, and to release that suffering from our own family lines. We asked for healing, and for forgiveness. And we sang to her, our song of love and sorrow and of healing, and then together, we walked on.
The next month, we conceived immediately again. This conception brought the birth of our beloved son, Dylan Rama, who has brought us more joy then we could ever have known.
We continued to visit our Mother Tree throughout our pregnancy. Then, on New Year’s Day, we went with our beautiful boy, so that he too could meet this great mother. We touched her skin, the gnarls of her brown-grey bark. We looked for our stone egg, which seemed to have been taken. At fist I felt sad about this. How could someone have taken it? It had clearly been placed there with love and intention. It had clearly been serving some purpose for whoever placed it. And then, with the exhaustion of new motherhood, and the understanding that these things were simply beyond my control, I just let it go. That stone has another life now somewhere, re-birthed and recreated, like the cycle of nature herself. And I was happy for it.