July came and went, as it does. This month that used to feel like the epitome of summer joy has, over the last two years, felt more like holding my breath after a deep inhale.
As if I might burst. As if gathering all that is here together and holding it all in might be the only way through. As if – to pull a line from my last post – I could be a levee.
But July is also the month I became a mother.
Eleven years ago I labored through a hot sunny day and into night. When progression stalled and my midwife told me that my body needed to relax, that I had to stop pushing for two hours, I asked, How?
And she replied, I don’t know.
We turned off the lights, lit two candles.
The midwife gave me some tinctures, and I closed my eyes. Waves swelled and crashed through me. The whole birth team breathed along with each contraction. Somehow, an hour passed, then thirty minutes more. Somehow, in that time the parts of myself that needed to soften softened. Somehow, my body opened and a bright being of a baby flowed into the world with the ease of a fish in a river’s current.
The first lesson of motherhood is this: let go.
Letting go brought my child into the world. The new space between our bodies allowed me to look at him, to hold him up in the world, to snuggle him in my arms. And what relief and lightness my body felt after that final push!
Holding it all in has its time, but so does release.
I’ve always thought of summer as the season of growth and autumn as the season of letting go, but life isn’t so clear cut as categories written on a page. Coming into being and letting go are more often tangled together in one moment.
Now, in the aftermath of July’s storms, I remember giving birth.
How I didn’t know how I’d make it through those last two hours. How I did it with a circle of people around me.
Valarie Kaur, lawyer-activist, author of See No Stranger, and founder of The Revolutionary Love Project, speaks of the time we’re living in as the stage of giving birth called transition. Transition is when the pain is so great, you don’t know how you’ll make it to the next breath.
As the world contracts and crashes, as we roil in the instability of violence and climate change, Kaur says:
“What if this is not the darkness of the tomb but the darkness of the womb?”
What if we – as a society, as a world – are in transition, birthing a new way into being?
What are we needing to let go of now?
How are we being called to soften?
As you contemplate these questions, I invite you to put down the idea that you must do something on your own.
More often the work is in coming together, joining the circle of people who are laboring together in this great transition.
You are allowed to start small. You are allowed to do only small acts. Take a lesson from seeds – how small they are, how all they do is soften and put out roots and stalks and blooms, and then turn again into seeds and start over.
It’s the small acts that turn seeds into fields of food and flowers.
Small acts, over and over, like breathing in and out, that move us through transition, and give us the strength for that big final push.
A thousand small acts added together, delivering us into the relief and bright possibility of birth.