Pregnant with Creation
Gestating our manifestations
My Unexpected Pregnancy
I’ve been recalling my pregnancy a lot recently. Perhaps it’s because my “baby” just graduated from high school last weekend. Perhaps it is the new growth of late spring.
I remember how much I loved being pregnant. Our pregnancy was not intentional. We had been married six months and were a few days away from leaving for our 6-week honeymoon backpacking around Central America when I took the test to confirm why my menses still had not appeared. I cried from the shock of the unexpected as much as from the joy of it. We scrambled to figure out how to tweak our honeymoon to suit our new circumstances. But there was no question in my mind that I wanted a baby. I always wanted to have a baby.
I wanted to experience being pregnant. I had a female body after all and struggled with painful and disturbing menstrual cycles my whole life, I might as well put it all to use. I also love to live life to the fullest and experiencing childbirth seemed to me like one way to do that.
Travelling pregnant in the Yucatan, Guatemala, El Salvador and Belize, proved to be difficult. We could only take short bus rides because I constantly had to pee. Even then, I still had to embarrassingly ask the bus driver to pull over for me sometimes in far out locales making the whole bus wait for me. Gratefully, the people were always very kind and understanding, but it was not lost on me that pregnant in Spanish is embarazada and sounds very much like embarrassed.
I also could not eat beans and rice and was always searching for a burger. I ate my first burger in nearly 10 years in Guatemala. I even climbed a volcano while pregnant.
Volcano I climbed a volcano today to give you fire. Fearlessly because the molten river crumbled beside me, my rubber soles immobile and melting over hollow black rocks, my lungs burning from the smoke pyre that billowed out of the livid mountain core. Over my shoulder, the sun set in lava and plum hues and the darkness turned the crust lip of peak to shadow. Your father held my hand as he guided me blind back down the steep trail, night air cooling the sweat from my body. You, a flimsy pea, in abdomen forming organs and spine, climbed a volcano today. You will have fire, to breathe, to spit, to stand on, unflinching and bold. From my poetry chapbook Gestation (Finishing Line Press, 2020)
The Magic of Pregnancy
I was very active and loved to go hiking for my entire pregnancy until the very end when I had to go on bed rest for a few weeks and then I loved to nap beneath the apple tree along the river and dream of the little being brewing inside of me. As I grew more rotund, people gave up their seats for me on public transit and told me unabashedly how beautiful I was. I felt beautiful and special. I felt magical. I was doing the most magical thing in the entire world, growing a human inside my body. I was mystified by my amazing body that was built by my mother who was built by her mother and so on forever to the beginning of time. My body made room for creation within it as if this space was always there, always waiting to be filled with life.
Pregnancy is truly magical. And though these last few weeks have made me nostalgic for those times as my daughter prepares to leave the nest, I have also been able to reflect on all the ways in my life that I continue to be pregnant with the magic of creation.
Creative Pregnancy
As a writer, I feel the essays, stories and poems growing inside of me before I ever put them on the page. This essay, for example, has been building in me through meditation, imagery and sensations in my body, before the words even formed. During this time of gathering and distilling, there has been a magic circulating about me. Tiny particles of what wishes to come into being circulate around my aura, waiting for me to grab onto them and draw them closer.
The same is true for when I create a new art piece or curriculum for a new course or yoga workshop or when I upcycle a piece of furniture or plant in my garden. When something is coming into creation through me, my spirit, my mind, my body, I am pregnant with creation. Sometimes I am pregnant with this new manifestation for years, sometimes for only moments before it burst out of me. But no matter how long the gestation is, this is a magical time of pregnancy, the moment right before and during birth when creation happens.
Maybe it’s not as obvious as a big round belly, but I do believe that people can tell. People close to us and sensitive ones and fellow creators, they know. They sense that something is developing within us, though perhaps they cannot name it. When we are in a state of creation, people notice all the ideas and potentials orbiting our aura like a shining light of possibility. Just as a pregnant woman shines.
What is pregnant in you right now? These weeks leading up to Summer Solstice are so full of magic and potential, vibrant with pregnant energy. What are you ready to birth? Sense what is circling you, asking you to call it forth and birth it into the light. I’m so excited for this moment.
Wisdom of Birth Deck
One thing I helped to birth this season is the Wisdom of Birth oracle deck. I was a doula of sorts, assisting two beautiful women, a birth doula and a mom, who had the idea to create a deck that could support women in pregnancy and birth. When they found my collage art and invited me to be the artist for their deck, I was more than thrilled to be a part of the project. It took many years to come to fruition as all the multiple parts of the project had to align but the wait was well worth it.
Just as in real pregnancies, creative pregnancies that are long past their due date can be risky. Symbolically, our creations can go stale and fail to launch. But these two women were not afraid of letting their baby gestate as long as needed. Sometimes that is true in creation, sometimes we need a long gestation period, and we must trust the process no matter how long it takes. I am glad they did because it has been a beautiful success.
The Kickstarter launched last month and was successfully funded with over 200 funders. If you did not get a chance to pledge, no worries, they are keeping it open a few more days so that you can still receive some of the rewards like prints and candles with my art on them and of course the deck, which includes all 78 cards with original digital collage artwork, gold foil trim, the guidebook with prompts and a tarot key.
You don’t have to be pregnant to use this deck. The prompts, images and words can easily translate to creative pregnancies and all the things you are birthing. You can use the questions in the tarot key as writing and art prompts.
If you are interested in my poetry chapbook that I wrote while pregnant with my daughter, you can find that here.
