"Do not wait for your pain to depart for it is the nothingness that creates the vacuum that begins the cycle of rebirth and re-entry of Love Only allow even in the midst of all that gives you pain to open your expanding heart and feel the breath beginning to carry away the grief and carry in the light to breathe out the fear and breathe in the love until without thinking you have chosen life in all its complexity once again This is the choice that is knowing Not simply feeling the pain or thinking of the fear but rather knowing as the baby knows how to suckle as the heart knows how to beat and the soul knows that Love is infinite and so any other state of belief must be the illusion of the wound we have come here to reveal and then heal It is true that the greatest faith is born out of the deepest lack for when we are most empty there is the most room for the next breath the next song Trust in the power of breathing for it lives beyond life and death as we imagine them in the breath of the universal light expanding into the universal dark waiting only to better illumine the power of all Love This is a peace that will comfort every crying child like the kiss of the Great Mother herself Let your breathing begin" ~ excerpt Knowing Breath ~ Oonah
The story goes, my bassinet was covered with lace and my brothers ran all the way around the block shouting out to the neighbors that they had a sister. I expect their excitement may have lasted no more than a week because most of the stories I heard after that were about how unfair it was that I had dresses and dolls and toy tea cups all my own.
I was born during a decade which I like to call the dark ages of obstetrics. My mother was given a drug they called Twilight Sleep. It did nothing to ease her pain but rendered her fully incapable of speech or movement. Her inability to speak must have simplified things for her doctor, while her immobility made it much easier for him to see between her legs, which were suspended in mid-air in cold metal stirrups, while she lay flat on her back in the most unimaginably uncomfortable posture for giving birth. All told, the experience of childbirth was a nightmare for her.
Given the bliss of existence in utero, it’s hard to imagine what an about-to-be-born infant feels, being compressed into the birth canal while sharing the very blood and heartbeat of a mother in terror and agony. It seems perhaps a fitting introduction for a Starborn soul to this dense material plane, to be birthed into searing fear and harshness. To immediately know the suppression of feminine power and be pulled and slapped, wailing into a world of disconnection and heartlessness.
It has taken me an entire lifetime, and many years beyond her death, to realize the extent to which my mother loved me.
May my children make this discovery sooner than I.
Many thanks for all the beautiful birthday wishes which have flooded in from friends and family. As Joni Mitchell said, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Such a clear expression of the purposefulness within duality.
Arigato. I am grateful.
And on this special day, I have announced the decision to leave social media behind and move all my writing to Substack. It is my birthday wish to connect here with all my loved ones and friends, a most wonderful place to share our stories, poetry, art, music and love. If today is the day you feel inspired to subscribe, thank you so very much; I am thrilled that you are here with me.
You have made my day. Happy Birthday to me.
much love, Adi
Happy BeEarthDay Adi! <3