tending the ki(l)n and the currents
“I imagined, I daydreamed, I felt and I mused. I observed, I wondered, and experienced clearly. I recalled the same center from a new angle. I envisioned and suspected. It was sudden and simultaneous. And I was shocked but not surprised, for I am a woman with the Sight.” — Journal Entry, September 2025
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It’s November 2023 and I’m womb-deep in hypnosis, reconciling for the umpteenth time the pain of a paltry matrilineal inheritance. I had lost my mother to religion, and the ones before her to time and silence.
‘I’ve chosen you to be my mother.’ whispered my grandmother Janet as I crossed back into the land of consciousness. The words rolled around in my mind like a tongue playing with a lollipop as I stared absentmindedly at my two new plants, Alice the Hibiscus and Harriet the Honeysuckle, thinking it would happen years from now.
Thirteen moons later, on the night my baby was born, all the planets gathered to celebrate his arrival — the first night of a seven-day planetary parade. And while it took my son 19 hours to arrive earthside, it would take another 12 months before I even crowned.
Down the Spiraled Lens
In My Field: veils, revelation, owls, labyrinths, feminine processes of provision
I’m two months postpartum. ‘Veils’ and ‘revelation’ have entered my consciousness, followed by an incessant appearance of owls — in social media posts, neighborhood walks, a shungite figurine from a friend, a forgotten oracle card in the back of a closet.
‘Wise women and owls have walked together hand-in-wing for millennia, the words for both ‘bird’ and ‘witch’ are the same in various languages. The owl’s vision is keen in all conditions. Other notable characteristics of the owl are its noiseless flight and its ability to turn its head almost all the way around on its shoulders.’ — Barbara G Walker1
Ah, the first phase of initiation for my first semester of motherhood. I meditated on the wide dilated eyes of the owl, sensing this was not the time to seek but to be still. The more I sat, the more shadows came forward to be witnessed.
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How much of me is a performance to myself?
This question that clenched my consciousness blinded me with the sudden light of everything. I saw how dependent I was on particular environments to access certain states of being, how I approached my womb as a fleshy Zoltar, how I rushed to articulate succinct and polished meanings from my experiences rather than let them unravel and suspend me. I realized how often I had put myself into containers and shrink rather than make friends with my own scary vastness — submitting to the good girl suit I had long outgrown.
She was credentialing me, her coursework an ancestral transmission that was my son. This was a shift from my beloved study and research to ordination by sacred endowment. Touching and tuning bodymind’s finest flickers of gnosis, I used all sets of my eyes: hair, hands, nipples, womb, feet — to stare into the soul of my surroundings. The less I sought to know, the more I (re)cognized. Revelations arrived, sudden and profound.
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I observe [scrutinize?] these naked curves in the mirror, trying to scope out my maiden body underneath. To think that I actually thought I’d be able to birth a baby and leave no evidence of such is very maiden and vain of me, yes. The word ‘humble’ comes from the Latin root ‘humus’, meaning ‘earth’. I think of this when I gaze at myself in the mirror and I know She’s doing me a favor, lifting me from the airs of delusion and gently placing me back on solid ground, pointing me in the direction of what’s real.
I study the scars, my belly and thighs forever branded. Scar tissue has greater tensile capacity than that of untouched skin, able to handle greater blows than it’s naive counterpart. This reminds me of the structural nature of feminine becoming, which is more about the dense work of integration than it is about the airier work of letting go.
I look at these little fleshy stripes, these fractals. I think of lightening, veins, tree branches and rivers. I think about how Nature repeats Herself and how I am just an emanation of Mother Divine. I glance at my baby and wonder how did I ever have the audacity to not want to appear changed by the life changing?
And that’s how I found God in my stretch marks.
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It’s early spring and I’m at the annual mystic fair walking a chalk labyrinth, which led me to the movie by Jim Henson and its corresponding book by A.C.H Smith. Like the owls, labyrinths bombard my consciousness: first an article on Ariadne in a 1988 issue of SageWoman magazine, then Ariadne’s Thread by Shekhinah Mountainwater, followed by Nicole Schwab’s The Heart of the Labyrinth.
‘The pagan tradition of walking the labyrinth as an initiatory death/rebirth ritual was a procedural transmission, representing pilgrimage to the Holy Land and back again, designed to decompose and regenerate consciousness.’ — Barbara G Walker2
There are no dead ends and no shorts cuts in the labyrinth, an apt metaphor for my walk with Her. That’s the feminine way, spiraling higher through the circles of time. Enchanted by Her red thread, I found myself meandering through the bends, the scales of my belly gripped to god on the ground. She was taking me to the inner sanctum.
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‘Last night I dreamt that I was at some sort of fancy outside gathering with several white circular tables. My left nipple kept popping out of my dress. No matter how many times I kept tucking it back in, it would find its way free again. A pale man dressed in a tux and a thick mustache with dark slicked back hair passes by. We catch eyes, his disapproving as I tuck myself back in. I get up from my seat and wake up.’ — Journal Entry, May 2025
It’s been six months of breastfeeding and my breasts are much softer. I look at them and think of cosmic eggs, feeling like I’ve arrived at some secret club, of sorts.
The wandering eyes below the eyes can, according to nipple lore, speak the language of omens and fortune. ‘Aye! Look closely at the streams.’ she says to me, sniffing the tellings of the winds and waters. Nipples are a relational lens — extending beyond herself to peer into the world of another, gauging the position and quality of something. A tool of neuroception, it is through the nine orifices of the nipple that a woman can receive, sort, and convey finely tuned information on all levels — psychic and tactile — allowing for complete seeing.
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Themes in My Field: Alice in Wonderland, the looking glass, reflections, crystal balls
My bloodtide is back, I am surprised she has broken her silence so soon, my baby is only four months. I bleed on a rag and read the images a few hours later.
Right side up, I see hands. One turn left, I see flames. Another left, I see a frog. Left again, I see a woman with the body of a dove and fins for a tail, her long hair a trailing wave behind her.
‘Purify me of everything that is not free.’ I whisper in prayer, an auguring of what’s next.
& Into the Fiery Furnace
‘I think I’m beginning to understand the ‘Flowers of the Maiden, Fruits of the Mother’ download I received last year and why I needed to live a little bit more before I could write it. I understand how the maiden in me was attempting to caricature her interpretation of mother because she was afraid to let all her petals go, to surrender to it all, to let herself die. Ah, but this act of the play is over, and she played the hell out of her role.’ — Journal Entry, October 2025
I’m six months pregnant, headed to my solo Mother Welcoming ceremony at a Goddess temple on the sacred lands of the Western Shoshone Nation, an hour’s drive from my home in the desert mountains. It’s a warm, windy Tuesday afternoon and I’m crying at the feet of a Sekhmet statue, speaking with my grandmother who spoke to me of her arrival just 11 months before. I prayed and gave offerings and spoke oaths to Gaia. I danced and blessed and welcomed my motherself, unknowing then of how much of me would need to die. Until you’re in the thick of it, it’s really all just theory.
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‘Her self is the center of an expanding horizon of experience.’ — Carol P. Christ3
The endowment requires you to grow down, grow into. It asks you to work the same spiritual muscles in new ways. I’ve never had a home before, let alone been the hearth of one. I’m building the kiln as I fire it up, praying I don’t blaze this whole bitch down. Vastly unprepared to be centripetal force, the suffocating heat of the desert summer became a breathing analogy of my life. Burnout in every sense of the word, the cauldron of purification tempered and wearied me. Even Alice the Hibiscus and Harriet the Honeysuckle are scorched from the heat, all their leaves fall. They look how I feel. Everything clamored for my attention — my baby, my husband, my creativity — I spent the whole summer grumbling and grumpy about everyone in the house wanting a piece of me. I bring the plants inside and begin the recovery process; pruning, watering, singing them back to health, thinking about how much I missed myself.
Etymology of the word ‘hearth’ points to the Latin word for ‘focus’. Knowing this experience offered the fecund tension of transition, I make a playlist for morning worship and call it ‘Getting Bigger’. Yet, I still walked through the fiery threshold growling and grappling. Fuel me, Kindle me, Tend me, Great Mother.
I am the hearth finding her center.
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Themes in My Field: water, seashells, Yemaya, (watch)towers, the all-seeing eye
As June passed the torch to July, the watery reflections of Cancer season started to ripple. Something was coming, a conversation, perhaps reckoning. ‘If you make sure you’re connected, the writing’s on the wall. But if your mind’s neglected, stumble, you might fall.’4 — the tune inked itself into my eardrums a few days before the lightening strike of my life.
‘The despicable revealed itself to me. I saw all that was disgusting. I stood before it. And I did not let it harden me.’ — Journal Entry, August 2025
Blood is thicker than water, yes — but where I come from, religion is thicker than blood.
I walked away from my unbelonging for a second time, completing a delayed initiation botched by illusion. My maiden dreams came true and snuffed out the last embers of a self past due. Just as a snake’s eyes cloud before shedding, mine clouded in grief in the cool dark of my garage, the only place cave enough to unravel. Every afternoon while my baby slept, I drowned in gallons of despair spiked with double shots of gratitude. Before our departure, my mother unknowingly confirmed my intuitions about our motherline, casually revealing the names of her mothers: Alice and Harriet. I am bewildered.
Things are coming into focus.
She Beheld it All and Became Herself
I’m softer now, stronger, nine months postpartum. Still not recognizing this face, searching desperately for familiarity and not finding any. I looked and looked, searching for myself, and espied within my own eyes a desert of foreign terrains. When will I see me?
‘The once universal belief that one’s reflection is a vital part of one’s soul, mirrors and other reflective surfaces were long regarded as doorways to other realms. … The rather muddle theory behind scrying mirrors seemed to be that if all existence was but a reflection of a hidden truth, then looking through the ‘doorway’ of the mirror would reverse the process and reveal reality instead.’ — Barbara G Walker5
My little baby’s starburst eyes became a mirror into my pastfuturepresent, into the culture, into humanity and its own cyclical timelines. Seems to me that motherhood and prophecy go together, as mothers and mothering are most visceral premonitions of the future available.
‘In exploring deeper levels of her self, [she] comes into contact with “the psychic atmosphere of her period”. She explores a reality underlying ordinary reality and … becomes a seer, [develops a] spiritual consciousness defined by the “watcher”, that part of herself which observes, understands, becomes conscious of the deeper dimensions of her experience. Waiting is the major discipline of this consciousness. She does not know what she is waiting for, but she recognizes it when it is given to her, and then she takes active steps to explore it further. Knowledge of self and world is always concrete, related to her experience, a deepening of it. She uses books only to verify her insights, to confirm something she knows or half knows. Her knowledge is not abstract, nor is it a knowledge unconnected to ordinary life. Nothing she knows is arbitrary, surprising, unrelated to something she had known before, but on a different level. She is conscious that her self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are intimately related. She trusts that whatever happens, wherever she goes, the process of living will provide her with opportunities to deepen her insight.’ — Carol P. Christ6
I could not recognize my own face in the mirror but I became one to the overculture, bearing the fingerprints of all mothers, reflecting cultural assumptions and projections of motherhood. Strangers fawned, advised, and superimposed their own experiences over my words. Standing outside of it, yet centered in it all, I read the currents and prayed for discernment. Eyes widened, I exchanged dialogue with all that came before me, and knew that none of it was mine to hold.
Alice the Hibiscus bloomed three times.
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‘May the motherless be mothered by the earth, and be lifted by the unseen hands of their ancestors.’ — Kalaéja Emaun, A Prayer For Mothers
In My Field: fire and ash(water), crows, sunsets
‘I put my feet in the dirt to help clear my eyes.’ — Journal Entry, December 2025
I prayed and prayed to make sense of my motherline. As answered prayers sometimes do, mine seeded itself across time and story in The Faithful Gardener by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes. It was at the end of the tale, when the little tree turned ash, gazing at itself in its new form: ‘Look at me, I am everywhere.’ — my breath caught in my throat — message received.
Ah! Another pruning of stories and selves that were past due, for myself and for my motherline. I sang blessing over them and sent them off, crafting a scent spell to honor this passing of the torch.7 ‘Give me a good death.’ I prayed. ‘Make me hospital soil.’
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In My Field: pine trees/cones, new soils, protection knots
‘New seed roots most deeply in the places that are most empty.’ — Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés
It’s November 2025 and things are full circle from a higher vantage point, two years after my grandmother chose me to be her mother.
Advent is days away and I’m feeling the pull to sit by my pine tree. Holding fallen pinecones, my fingers running along the spiraling rows of little eyes, my mind wanders. ‘We stripped it bare so that it might be saved.’ — my great grandmother Alice said in my ear. Immediately I am flooded with relief. It is a gift, this paltry inheritance. My ancestors gave me only what I needed: the taproot.
‘In everything that dies, you can find a blessing bone8 in its skeleton. Search for the blessing bone. And when you find it, cleanse and bless it with songs. Song is the universal fluid, celestial blood. It will bring you to life.’* — Journal Entry, November 2025
Fluent in the Currents
‘Take out one’s own eyes, roll them like dice, swallow them up, grow them again.’ — Journal Entry, April 2025
Presentfuturepast curling around and within, my ancestors chose me as the hearth and everything came into focus. I birthed and was birthed by fire and water. I found my feet on strange lands, everything foreign and exactly as it should be. I am more body, more embodied. Just as my hips have widened, so has my capacity. Seeded in the ashes, She took out my eyes and helped me grow new ones. I danced the way of the Phoenix and resurrected as all-seeing athanor, my lenses from all dimensions set on ‘vera iconica’ — ‘true image’, so I could see and tend to what is real. Turns out, tending both kin and current is really about keeping centered in self.
My husband and I took aura photos as the year came to an end, mine beautiful bursts of sapphire and amethyst. I gazed, smiling, at the colors of my third eye and crown, neither shocked nor surprised, for I am a woman with the Sight.
- Barbara G Walker, Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects ↩︎
- Barbara G Walker, Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects ↩︎
- Carol P. Christ, Spiritual Quest and Women’s Experience, Womanspirit Rising ↩︎
- ‘Connected’ – song by Stereo MC’s. ↩︎
- Barbara G Walker, Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects ↩︎
- Carol P. Christ, Spiritual Quest and Women’s Experience, Womanspirit Rising ↩︎
- Fire & Ash Perfume Blend: 3 drops Texas Cedar Wood, 5 drops each of Buddah Wood and Sandalwood, 7 drops Myrrh, 3 drops Carrot seed, 5 drops of Clove and 20 drops Ylang-Ylang, jojoba oil base ↩︎
- The blessing bone is a concept I came across in Dr. Vanya Leilani’s book, The Flesh & The Fruit ↩︎