Dear You, 

Dear incredible you. On the precipice of your own becoming. A version you have yet to see, yet to know, yet to be. This is Me talking to You. 

I want to remind you that you are already stronger than you think you are. You are woman. Fire. Earth. Blood. Bone. You are the rumbling Herself that brings Life forward into Being. Despite your own shallow attempts to undercut your own sensual perfection and to distract yourself in all ways possible from destiny’s desire on you, you are, 

Here. 

Slowly and also so swiftly,

Arriving. 

Do not fear your own power. Do not fear your own Love. Do not fear your own compassion. Do not fear your own vulnerable swollen heart that never goes back to the size it was before. 

You know the scientists say your heart muscle and your uterus muscle are made from the same kind of tissues. One returns to its original size. One never does. 

You will come to see that a part of you now lives forever outside your own skin. You will come to see more than ever that you are not in control. Don't hold sold tightly to the things you wanted. Let it go. This is better. This is best. Don't hold so tightly to your beliefs. Just hold tightly to your Faith. Let go of the roughness and the harshness. But hold your might and your ferocity close to your heart and in the back of your tongue. You will likely need it. 

Dearest unborn mother, there is no ready. There is no right time. There is no perfect. What is broken is whole already. You know this to be true. What it is longing is longing for you. What is ready is simply the ripeness of seen and unseen forces guiding you, holding you, swaying you forward. 

Forever. 

When you are older than you are today you will see it is all as it should be. When you have more lines on your face that hold the worry and the fear of a person you love that is you, but not you, you will understand your own mother. And her mother. And her mother. 

As your hair turns grey and your eyes deepen and soften, the stars of the Mother’s Constellation will continually reveal themselves to you. There is only so much you could possibly understand now. Lest I blow your mind into a thousand starry bits that you could never follow. For now, know this: 

You already have what you need. There is no right thing or right way. And your way is unfolding before your eyes, each day, each breath, each kiss, each daily ritual of living. Your way is Good. Holy and True. 

Go ahead. Banish the doubt now because it won’t help you anyway. While you’re at it, banish all the assumptions you have. They won’t be of much use any longer. Oh, and another thing dear mother in her own caul, don't let anyone tell you who to pray to. Don't let anyone tell you who to bow to. Bow to your self. To your unborn self. Bow forever to the seed. Pray always to the dark-red, golden place inside. There is nothing outside you that is better, fuller or more powerful. It is already there. It is not the kind of listening you might be used to using. It is not the kind of feelings you might be used to feelings. 

Risk everything. 

To the mother on the precipice, the brink, go ahead now, descend. 

Fall. 

Surrender. 

Fill and let go. 

You have done enough excavating, enough healing, enough work for now. Good work my darling lady. You have done the best you could. And that, you will come to find, is purely good enough. 

Know that there is immense freedom in being bound to your beloveds. Tether yourself now to a world that is always unraveling. 

Stay. 

Be here. 

There is no other way now. Bind your hands and your heart and your breast to Love and to the earthly human place that is merely a moment of your Time. 

You and I will meet again some day. A long time from now. You will be glad I wrote this to you. You will thank me and come to your knees. I’m you a thousand lifetimes away. Still the seed. Still the raging red golden part of you. Deeply alive. Deeply connected. Deeply reverent to the ever holiness Herself. And in that meeting you will see I am simply your own children speaking to you from inside yourself. 

Waiting for you to be born too. 

I walked the mud-drenched trail around the frozen lake that madly sunny, winter-warm afternoon. That’s the beautiful part of living in the Front Range of Colorado’s rocky mountains. It gets frigid and snows. Two days later, its melting and you hike in a t-shirt once again. So I walked in the warm sun. And at this point walking looks more like waddling. And a consistently ever slowing waddle at that.

Ankles bare and getting slightly muddied, my mind made winding traces and tracks back to the memory of the last time I saw my grandmother with my own eyes. 

It was June 2013, in the late afternoon, just after my bridal shower. She was too frail then to come out for the party and I knew she would not come to our wedding across the country here in Colorado. So I went to visit her clad in my white bohemian bridal outfit so she could see it and feel part of the festivities. My grandmother never liked it when I dressed “shlumpy” as she called it. 

She was drifting in and out of sleep when Elliot and I arrived. It took all her effort to sit up and sit straight in between us on the bed. I was dressed in that white dress my mother bought me for the occasion. Too which she said was just right as a beautiful bride. 

I was dressed in that white dress but my grandmother was the angel that day. You see, she bore with her own eyes more than any human being should ever have to endure. She hid for her life, birthed three sons (and one in a camp mind you), crossed and ocean with diamonds sown and smuggled in her skirt, buried her husband as well as a son and watched four granddaughters fly on with their lives. And nothing brought her more joy than the happiness of her granddaughters. 

That day I sat next to her she held my hand tightly and she held Elliot's tightly too. She drank us in with what remained of her sight. She knew that we were already legally married as we had told her some months before of our quiet ways—of which she seemed to approve. If she didn't I would never know. She was good about that. She kept things to herself if she didn't think her disapproval would help you or make a difference. 

By the time we sat with her on this hot June day, she had been rather frail and failing for some time and the sense I always got from trips past was that she just wasn't ready yet to let go. She didn't feel at peace to leave her body just yet and ninety-some years old. So she held on. And I have never seen anyone cling to the exquisitely poignant and painfully beautiful manifest world the way she did for those long few years. 

But on this day something about her was entirely different. She was so happy, so at peace. She held our hands tightly. She kissed us. She cried. And she told us she was okay now. She told us she knew everything was good now because I had someone to love and take care me. Elliot smiled and cried. She told us she was very proud of us. And that she was at peace knowing I was happy. I knew in that moment this would be the lat time I would see her. So I just smiled and twinkled my eyes at her in that white bohemian dress she told me I looked like a true bride in. I didn't want her to see how sad I was. We both knew were saying goodbye. 

None of this could have been very long in real time. She got tired rather quickley. And just like that she rather ushered us out the moment she got weary. She was done. And that was it. 

We went home. 

I wept. 

Four month later we had our wedding. 

A week later she left her body. 

Anyone on the trail that day who saw me must have thought I was in the middle of some crisis as the tears rolled like a mud slide down my cheeks. The way they are streaming now as I put these words to page. But something about the slow walk around the frozen lake that day—something about being 8 months pregnant— and something about that golden sun—made me think of her. 

Beauty often makes me not sad but melancholy. It is in these moments I feel all life as an ocean inside. I feel the joy and the deep sadness. I feel the gratitude and the longing. I feel the happiness and the deep well of sadness. I feel the fullness of being so human—so imprinted in a body—so marked by lineage and life. 

Perhaps the most painful part of being pregnant and bringing my child into the world, is that I do it without any of my own grandparents. For me, the saddest part about living in the world at this very moment is living in a world where my grandmother does not. This child whose time is coming rapidly now, would bring my grandmother the joy she truly always deserved to see in the world. My grandmother always placed her faith in the hope of the future. So she could leave once she knew I would carry on the torch. 

In this moment I laughed to myself, rounding the corner of the trail, as I realized something that perhaps we might call a bit TMI or (too much information) to share with you. But I will. That dress—that white dress I wore to the shower and that she loved—according to my calculations—I wore to a wedding the day I conceived my child. 

Funny how the universe plays these little cosmic jokes on us. Funny how she keeps on winking and batting her big bright eyes and long eyelashes. In love. In light. In death and loss. In birth and life. In it all she is with us. She is weaving all the parts of our lives into a bigger tapestry we could ever imagine. 

More and more I am learning the wisdom of these human bodies and find faith in a greater intelligence than the mind can even compute and comprehend. Try these on for size. 

Consider the size of the human baby and the size of the human vagina. 

Thats right people. It does not add up. Hence why they call it a “miracle”. Consider the vast differences we see amongst each other from the outside and yet how we share nearly the same genetic code. A sea of humanity in a myriad forms. Consider the size of planet earth within the whole of the solar system. A mere speck of stardust compared to the totality of it all. 

Up until recently I have been rather nonchalant and casual about my plan for birth. I know the best made planned rarely go exactly as such and I also know that for thousands of years the female form has birthed humanity into being. So I have gone about my business and figure, well, I suppose I will do it too. 

Last week in our birth class I hit a wall. I am not talking a fatigue wall where you rest and recoup. I mean, The Wall. I turned to Elliot and said, “You know, I just don't think this is for me after all. Too messy. Too intimate.”

I had hit what I call an intimacy threshold. That place where you are like. “Nope. I’m good watching from the sidelines”. I wanted to run and hide and crawl myself under a rock. I wanted not a single pair of eyes to see what I was feeling or the me I was being asked and beckoned to bring forth. Because what I am being asked to do is all too vulnerable, raw and real. 

I watched the seven other couples try different labor positions and tools that were set up throughout our room that evening. And I watched myself stand and peer out of my own skin frozen. Paralyzed. Looking desperately for the sign saying “Turn Back Here.” As grace would have it, there is no sign. There is no back. There is no way out other than through. 

Dammit. 

And so my intimacy threshold continues to be obliterated on a daily basis. In a the most awe inspiring and terrifying of ways. I suppose this is the true nature of Durga, the goddess, the great mother. 

Pregnancy has shown me the most deep and hidden reservoirs of internalized patriarchy inside myself. Imagine my horror as I come to realize that the most earthly and connected part of my own female form is the part I am most afraid to become and see revealed. Somewhere along the way, like many other women, I too have come to believe that the white virgin crowned in gold is better than the red messy drenched in tears. Pretty is better than honest. Angel is more revealed than animal.  

I am face to face with my own distaste for my bloody, brown, red, howling animal. My sense is, without her. Birthing will not be possible. If I was asking for a kind of re-wilding any where in my own psyche, the prayer is being answered whether I cognitively like it or not. 

This is the part of ourselves that is so raw and so awesome and so terrifying that we can barely look away nor can we look at it head on. It is that moment in the Bhagavad Gita when Arjuna wants to see the totality of Krishna only to find himself overwhelmed and begging for concealment once again. It seems to me as I stand on the precipice of experience and the edge of a new knowing that it is not just a baby that will be born, but a new version of woman. One that is more honest, more whole, more real.

Perhaps this intimacy threshold I speak of now is not the one between two lovers or partners or even in community for that matter. But between each of us as we come face to face with the concentrically deeper laces of our own selves.

This is the Bhakti path. The path of devotion. But the devotion is not to anything or anyone or any deity other than the innermost thrown of your own becoming. It is easy to love the beautiful, put together, organized, articulate, shiny, rose and vetiver scented version of myself who keeps her sheets and towels crisply folded and bleached white. But I wonder how easy it will be to love the forgetful, seeping, vulnerable, fullness. It seems to me that the path of devotion asks us not to crown another as Guru but instead to bow to each part of ourselves we birth, re-integrate and commune with. Bhakti is the path that asks us to strip away all other false gods and devote ourselves only, forever and continually to Love—the parts easy to love and the parts that make us turn away. 

In humaness