This week our little one is one year Earthside ~ and we are grateful • A dear friend of ours who also just had a baby said that she believes that the wave of children coming in now is incredibly strong, resilient and ready to bring about the next chapter of this world, and I feel the very same way • This little spirit of a human came in strong — and we are honored to be his parents. He instantly created sweeping shifts all at once in our lives and those around us — ripples everywhere — as if to say get ready, heal your relations but also stand in your truth, and live your deepest destiny, no matter what.
He has transformed our world and re-birthed us all at once, and the incredible experiences that we have gone through have shifted the pendulum and the gravity in our world. In this line, I have been in the process of feeling the trajectory of my own life, and my life's work as a whole...
All of the work that I have engaged in over the course of the years is based around threshold space. For example, there is a piece, SHED, that I facilitated in 2015 with three women, including myself, and only the trees as witness. Within this piece each of us took a walk naked through the woods after the falling of a heavy snow, and in frigid temperatures.
Why, one might ask? I could speak endlessly about the symbology of the woods and of women and of finding the wild self and one’s embodied voice through the darkness, but more importantly this is an example of the kind of ritual work that I’ve done all of my life. Even as a child I was drawn to ritualize experiences in very specific ways, including walking labyrinths, building mandalas and creating dances.
This is because ritual marks a moment. Ritual forges meaning out of suffering and experience, which is the material of life, and ritual assists us — as Joseph Campbell speaks so eloquently about — in moving into more expanded states of our own consciousness. Otherwise, we remain trapped in the same state of being through the course of a lifetime. That was never the life that I wanted to live — and I identified early on that we live in a culture that has forgotten how to do this — a culture that honors celebrity and wealth above all — and that cares very little for the spiritual and psychic life of an individual.
And so I, we, forged our own threshold spaces, made our own meaning out of rituals that are long dead and disembodied. And I have made a lifetime of work out of doing just this in both teaching, and performing.
And now, as I’ve crossed a new threshold into motherhood, I am re-imagining many things. I have felt the calling very specifically to provide ceremonies for women as they prepare for birth, postpartum an beyond. When we honor the mother, we honor the child as well. These Ceremonies will be a great joy for me to offer, as I hold a sacred space for these profound rites of passage within a woman’s life.
This is in no way a career change, my work in a sense has always been women’s work from my dance ritual to somatic movement teaching, healing and performing, all of which I will continue to do.
But I do also feel drawn now to help women navigate and above all protect these threshold spaces, drawing a boundary around what is sacred.
And so our transformations continue as I expand as mother — carrier of medicine — and we look to the future as well.
to be continued…