Conceived in Collaboration: An Unbecoming
I turn 50 this year. I am amazed by this achievement. I am aware that this 5.0 cycle is an upgrade. I know it sounds strange, especially given the cultural messages WE have ingested regarding living AS aging.
I AM aged—cultivated and marinated—through this living journey. I am flesh, but also more than this body. I am greatly conceived at this moment as SOULarity. I use this playful mash-up to describe a clarity of soul that illuminates my expression beyond any imposed corporeality or sense of time.
I am born of no body, wanted by no thing, witnessed in every thing, found every where.
This is my conception of me NOW. Arriving to celebrate my 50 years of this living AS being. My awareness consumed by conversations on being conceived through collaboration. The truth is life is always a collaboration with life. Sometimes what requests an energy exchange is not gentle. Sometimes we are conceived through and with force—contraction and expansion.
As one often does, I look back on my life to witness shattered moments that had me climb into the grandest canyon of my broken heart and feel my HUMAN being TRANSFORMED. Broken open by life itself, touched by the heart of matter and marrow.
I’d like to share with you one such moment
At 33 (3’s are symbolic and ancient life markers) I decided I wanted to be pregnant. I say “I decided” because when we are younger, we think that is how it works. I want something now, so I will make it happen NOW. And as life has it, I learned quickly, painfully, that I was wanted for something else before what I wanted would want me. In those years of my wanting, I would be without.
Humbling is the nature of expectations.
Before my daughter was conceived, I would cry an ocean of tears, for in my desire to become pregnant, I would witness the weight of my unloved, unlived, and unmet. I would become pregnant after undergoing multiple IUIs and one successful IVF, only to be transformed by miscarriage at ten weeks. Alongside this big death were smaller deaths—aspects of my identity and perceived purpose. With death came big losses, the loss of hope, connection, and a sense of security tied to this third-dimensional existence.
It became a body battle, an exhausting exercise that illuminated deep pockets of pain and otherness. It became a crisis of spirit battling with identity, a fear-filled, doubt-filled, lonely journey into the shadowy cave of myself. I had met my match, boxing with my shadows and losing it all.
In my unbecoming, I would drown in this largest lake of ache AND know I could hold on no longer.
Lagrimas (tears)
This word became a poem
Lago (lake)
Mas (more)
Ritma (rhythm)
I would drift on a rhythmic lake of tears and be reconfigured.
After my miscarriage, just one month later, I became pregnant again. In the depths of my despair, my daughter was conceived, at a time when I was certain I had been emptied and barren I would remain.
Despite the shadows of my pain, her cells grew and multiplied within my womb. Her life was an expression of vitality infused with magic.
Three weeks before her predicted due date, my amniotic fluid would dry up, again predictions challenged by life's unexpected invitations.
AMNIO
am-nio
I AM
NIO—NEW
This word, too, would become a poem
Divine fluid
Holy water
Water of creation
Water of beginning
Dew drops
Mothers tears
Life and death
Death Enlivened
Words are more than mere utterances; they are energy, conduits of communication, and divined expressions.
I think of this now and wonder. how my body, bared and broken open, carried her as she grew me.
She would arrive only a little early but be unprepared to breathe. Not expected, yet I now understand. She would need to be freed from the weight of my fear.
I couldn't breathe with trust and ease as she grew within me; fear stole my breath, leaving me with shallow breaths every day, every moment until she arrived. And upon her arrival, she struggled to breathe.
We both needed so much help, and it came in undeniable and unexplainable ways.
I would need to learn to breathe again, to return to my AMNIO, to be re-souled. She would teach me this. I would teach me this. Life would divinely instruct US. I would go on to meet many teachers who would invite me to feel ME again, to be in my body again and let the ocean of me, be free.
My concept of ME was quickly consumed by identity again: wife, mom, therapist. Safe, secure, known, established. Check, check, check. Wake up, rinse, and repeat. Life would invite me to lose once again. This time, though, the world as we knew it would need to come to an abrupt halt, prompting a not-so-subtle pause. We all were changed by 2020.
In 2021, I met Ginny Nadler, and embraced my inner knowing leading me into the unknown discovering. To agree to shed even more of my persona to be my entire person. To live my life as an awareness of mystery and flow, heart unbound.
I would discover the tremulous that would once have announced itself as fear. Now I would be conceived only as ALIVED. For the only contraction that interferes with this ALIVED is fear. It would have me love less, feel less, be less, show less, do less, contractually agree to less when I am more.
To conceive of this more is nearly impossible to do alone, we are meant to remember collaboratively,
WE are love, a vital contagion, undeniable—ever evolving, ever ready to conceive US.
