Yesterday, I happened to look at a digital clock right at 11:11 AM -- on 11/11. I mean, talk about portals! That's a quadruple one. I have experienced a lot of change these last few years, walked through many metaphorical doorways, and even, as longterm readers know, fallen through a few.
Yet in this lifetime, there is one "portal" that I never experienced and presumably never will, and that is physical pregnancy. I know I must have been a mother in other lifetimes. I have an urge to "mother" in many situations, and a surprisingly live housewifely side. I love to cook and bake, in the general sense, to feed people. What volunteer activity I do this coming winter will undoubtedly be in that ballpark. But that is not the same as having carried a baby within you. I am sometimes sad not to have had that experience this time around.
The combined influences of having reached 65 ("retirement age") and a new COVID spike are creating an opportunity. The quiet of this coming winter can support, if I allow it to, a really powerful "pregnancy". I am not ready to "retire", or begin to slide away from life, and to avoid that will require an energetic push in the not-too-distant--future which I need to prepare for.
The phase I was in for the last twelve years or so -- attempting to re-engage with England and the English cathedral music world from a number of different perspectives -- started to peter out during the pandemic because of travel restrictions and restrictions on cathedral choral singing. Do I feel less connected with England? Right now, yes. It's just the reality. I am not there. In 66 years of life, I have lived less than three in the British Isles. I may essentially still feel English, but I have decided for the next year to completely set aside the impulse to try to get back there. It's not the angry/frustrated thing that it was in my 30's, more just a letting go.
Some kind of enhanced expression of the divine feminine is percolating in me, so for the heck of it, I am going to think of the next 9-12 months as pregnancy. Above and beyond this blog, what new creativity is being born in me? What form will it take? What do I need to do next? When these questions start to plague me, I will place my hands lovingly on my belly, and smile enigmatically, and trust the process happening within me. The thing about pregnancy is that a baby doesn't come out of the womb until it comes out of the womb. He or she isn't out in the world, well, until birth. So while I may speculate a bit in upcoming months about what is happening, I won't expect to fully "see" or understand what I am giving birth to until next August, plus or minus. I'll try not to panic, or push the process forward, or make assumptions. I'll try to make my inner and outer environments increasingly nurturing and welcoming, and ready myself to warmly embrace my new creative direction -- whether or not the compass points to a certain island nation!
