To return again and again…

Forgive me beauty, it has been over 8 months since I have published here. Cycles and their explorations do that. Happen, go deep, need time, bubble back up again then need to be expressed, so that there can be more happening… to go deep…

This last cycle has been a big one and now all is changed. A new era has arrived of my life and I am to allow this next self a bit of a moment to catch her breath. I have been my families carer for many years, at the cost of my career… strange how there is but a one little “e” between the too… tis more an “i” though I seek now.

If I were to be living only for me, not the caring of other, who would I be?

This is the new quest.

So, where do I put me now? Into cooperatives! A new way for me, a very old vessel, but finding new application as the laws become less prohibitive and more supportive of a powerful tool for many to be in charge of themselves. I have been learning the warp and weft of building cooperatives from the most amazing group of humans. Earthworkers.  Having traveled for over a year now, and still learning so much, I am feeling emboldened to begin another cooperative…. a secret for now, but one that makes my journey with the blood an epic adventure to share.

There is more to know, more to unfold of this next level of me, being me, delivering me to the world in ways that can be shared effectively, opening to this next level of what it means to bleed well. What women, can do in circles, when we are living and breathing a state of deep support for self, for other women. Beyond that, what humans can do in circles is pretty awesome too!

What does our world look like when our sovereignty is no longer in question. Like the Urulu statement  power can and does co-exist, there is no need to live in the either or state. Powerful women, connected and sure of their purpose, strength and meaning in their lives comes at no cost to the menfolk but perhaps re-frames domesticity training. Allowing for all that dwell within a home to collectively own the work of said home.

There is much work to be done.

We can all feel it.

We have an entire culture to turn, face and meet these next decades in front of us all.

None of us get another planet to live on.

We need to meet this one where she is, do what we can with what we have.

Every single solution we need we already have, all we seem to lack the will to use it.

Time is now to build that will, own our core worth to self, to other, to Earth.

Our Time, Attention and Energy. These are our truest commodities. Where we put any of them needs to become our active decision, not our default setting, which in true capitalistic form, is set to the next shiny thing.

Know your blood self, whole self. Live in Circle when/where you can. Share your blood wisdom with your family blood and heart, that you may be where you are meant to be, doing what is next for you to do.

See you in the Arena.

From Subjection to Objection.

Women have been subjected to many many thousands of years of subjection… being made subject… other, not OF power in any given sentence, only contextualized by the object of the conversation… Him. He gave us meaning, value, any power we supposedly had was granted by Him. Father. Brother. Husband. God. Any of the Him’s.

Now, now we Object. We make one of the clearest Objections we can, “NO.” Just “NO”.

We are the objects of our own narrative, our own story that makes us the center, central and with the power we get to use. Actually, I need to contextualize this further. Western White Women… and probably Maga‘s at that, although that being said, there are some pretty potent young women out there owning the shit out of their lives. Women get to be the authors, the authority of our own lives. Maybe that is what the Dali Lama meant.

For years I have offered the wisdom of the Blood that I live with. I have offered the tools to build the capacity to access and live with a truth of self that no one can take from you. I can not give you this truth. I can only share with you the ways, by no means the only ways, to find a wisdom and power that comes from transmuting the power of an ancient curse, into a strength that few can undermine.

This is a deeply embedded curse, a truly life affecting curse. So, I make offerings of beauty and power and wisdom. Knowing I cannot make something sacred FOR anyone, you can only do that for yourself…. but the converse of that is true too… No one, never ever again, can take away the sacred way I know my blood to be. This. This I can live. Perhaps there is no accident in how close these words are… sacred and scared… Perhaps that is why I can not give this to women. I can only inspire them to claim it for themselves as they move through the fear that they were not born with. Fear they have learnt, often from their mothers and a culture that would have all women subjected, made subject, not object of their own world.

So, this International Women’s Day. I ask you, can you find yourself sacred? No longer scared of what stories have been told, words spoken to contain a force that is busting at the seams to change this world. Can we find our blood sacred? Can we offer our blood back to the earth in one of the most singular, simple, yet life changing rituals of life. Our blood, collected by simple re-useable means, returned to Earth, as sacrament. Our ancient, sacred, capacity to bring life into this world, overflows naturally to earth. When we give away the blood without wound.

 “…taking responsibility for your bleeding ways is the reality-based revolution founded between the soft, luscious thighs of every woman on this planet”

by Inga Music, from CUNT: a declaration of independence.

Blessings of the Blood upon us ALL, for there are many.

 

To thine own self be true…

To be my own primary relationship. To put me first in my life, with deference to those that rely upon me for sure, but understanding I can help no one without putting on the oxygen mask first!

Most of my life my other has either been my mother and then my daughter, now my mother again. Very occasionally I have had a lover that became a partner, really only 4 times, the longest a 4 year relationship that could have been 2, but I am grateful for the learning.

That was my last relationship, and the picture that accompanies this blog is a jewel that was gifted twice! Originally this pendant was a ring. A ring that I and some of my nearest and dearest sisters, bought for me for my 40th birthday.  There was a ceremony by the fire where I married my self, just quietly, just me there, surrounded by all that loved me.

That was an awesome party! I was living in Eltham, my first share house after my “divorce” from my daughter, she was on her way to living the life she could.  I was sharing with a couple of men for a change of energy. Feeling through some of my newly permitted sexual nature. I was dating intensively, and had met a man that had my attention. There was much to be shared, he seemed to be able to hold that, be with that. This delicious man was at this 40th birthday party. He witnessed much of me out loud.

Maybe only 2 months later, the ring broke. I sent it back to the jeweler and asked for it to be made into a pendant. When I reached for it to be returned, the jeweler said that she had lost it, not to be found anywhere.

Then I slipped, slowly into a kind of coma, a kind of trance where I began to place his needs, his perspective alongside/above? Hard to tell, but mostly there was another to consider beyond myself. This had a tremendous amount of love in the fiber of this attraction, and I was deliciously delusional, but that wore away. We found less and less actual attraction for one another, which could have been the indicator,  but we ignored it for a while longer. Eventually, there was a way out presented and we took it.

Once the beautiful man made it back into his own world, and I returned unto myself I began to remember who I am, what I am choosing to do with this blessed life. This content becomes clearer with each moon.

Then one of those moments that just remind us gently of the divine plan took place. The first woman that my now ex partner began a relationship with, turned out to be the jeweler, within weeks of their dating, my pendant returned and the work was completed and placed upon a beautiful chain. This was then gifted to me. Returned to me as it is now and shall be held as a sacred reminder that I am married. I am married to me.

I missed this Scent

When I very first began upon my blood reclaiming journey, I was often over powered by the scent. That strong, iron like, pungent rising waft from my skirts if I was having a day at home, on earth, to just bleed.

Now, 25 years later and that scent still arrests me, grabs my attention with both nostrils and asks me to breathe deeply the truth of this deeply natural cycle. Blood is Good. To Bleed is Blessed. As I have not bled, peri-menopausal, since June, I am cherishing this bleed even more.

My trusted Keeper, the rubber menstrual cup, from the beginning, has been part of the access to this raw goodness. Sometimes when I go to empty it, I get that hand covered in blood, that marking of me by an ancient power. I feel that ecstatically now. When I open and let the honest truth of our bleed, what lay within it’s wisdom, the power inherent by being a bleeding woman, I find that state, a kind of sexy that glows for hours!

You must know I didn’t start here. I brought myself, and now many others, HERE. In the lands where to bleed is sacred and precious. Where gifting to our Earth our blood is the most honest of rituals, perhaps even the first of our race.

To be with the natural world, in a harmony that only blood can express.  All I have done is paid deep attention to this place within. Listening. Moving. Making Magicks. Writing. Sharing the Love. Breathing Deeply This Powerful Scent!

Please, if you have ever wished to love your bleeding self and NOTHING in your culture has ever showed you how, consider StarFire.  Classes listed at www.livinggently.com.au/classes

Blessings of the Blood Beautiful One, for there are so many!!

Breaking free from a sister’s curse.

 

I woke this morning from a very intense set of dreams, or one long dream, same same really. All the way through was a central theme; a woman I love, someone I knew for many years, (she kept changing) was and had been cursing me, containing me with magicks, dark and strong. In the dream I was finding way after way to meet this, to circumvent this, to find allies and ways and means to blast through the bounds, but it never fully made contact, nor did she ever get to fully bind me.

It is a good and juicy dream that I will chew on for a while, and explore the different ways in which I feel there is information in it, as one can do with dreams.

In my pondering this morning, my attention is brought to a conversation that I have been having with myself about me and my work and how it feels somewhat contained. Like someone/something has placed some kind of cone of silence or binding around me and my offerings. At first I just felt that there was a whole world binding on the menstrual goodness any woman can access, but as the red tide rises, and the menstrual awareness is becoming more commonplace… I wonder, is it just me?

I live in a small town that I know has a version of me that isn’t mine. I learnt that I am “that witch, with a coven, out there in the bush” It is true, I am a witch. Deeply proud of the work that is my calling; to relate to that direct conversation with the sacred, through thought, word, act and deed. I consider witchcraft to be a religion of poetry not theology (thanks StarHawk) I will explore this place ‘between’ for the rest of my life.

It is not just in my local sphere of influence that I feel contained though, as I often do not share what I do in my local surrounds, there is a stronger… something.

I get it, women are well trained to take other women down, especially if they are not being the allowed version of woman, the preferred kind of lady. Speaking to menstrual education, openly sharing the #loveoftheblood  makes a very dangerous woman indeed.

I will own, it may be of my own making. Some kind of protection as I was beginning, learning and needing to be cloaked in some way to allow myself to grow unseen, but like the tree guard that we use to allow the tree to grow un-browsed, soon it become a firm barrier to true potential.

So, this is me, taking down the guards, but not the wards. Allowing the full force of who I am and what I am here to share without a shadow of a doubt that I am a whole, real woman no different than any other. With different language, perspectives and skills because I taught myself, for sure, thus I can share deeply tools I have collected.

In these times we are living, learning to trust yourself, and building trusting relations with others, engaged in real relations with our earth… feels like the work we are here to do, now.

So much to share beautiful woman. Dive in. Swim Deep. Live Gently .

 

Cost of Treason? One’s truth!

To live one’s truth often means to deny the commonly held truths of our culture. There are a few that I challenge directly, daily, just by breathing. There is a big and terrifying truth that I consider my vocation.

Sharing the Love of the Blood.

To look in the mirror, any given day and truly love who you are, as you are, resilient to all the noise that will make you wrong as soon as you walk out that door. All the carry on that would like to take from you that glow, that grace, charging highly for the right to tell you that you are wrong and desperately need their version of right.

I reckon that is were I have failed, so far, in reaching out to women to share my work. For I don’t want to make any womb wearing human wrong for how they live with their womb, but I do want to share a Love of the Blood. A deep accepting, self honouring thus Earth honouring, Love of having a womb. Knowing that the womb governs so much of the experience of creation in our world.

Our fecundity; that rich, juicy overflowing capacity to create from a deeply aligned to the natural world place… that is what we have possible in our bodies. If we stop living from an externally defined mandate, and choose to listen; softly, gently to the wisdom of the womb, what would our world be like?

I get it. Firstly, it is treason to stop playing, turn away from and walk slowly off into the forest, mountain or ocean. Secondly, it feels like it will be a long lonely walk back towards a self that perhaps you may remember from being a child, that joy-full child that was the center of their own world. And I am not suggesting a narcissistic world view where it is ALL about you… What I am asking is, are you living aligned to your truth, that one that is in balance and harmony with the natural world.

I trust that none of us were born here to rape and pillage ourselves, each other or this blessed earth. Mortgaging today for some notion of retirement, or waiting to live only on the weekends or holidays. Spending time like it is an infinite resource when there is so very little of it left.

I know it is hard to go against the stream. I have been swimming upstream for 20 years, looking for the causal level of how women are contained in such a primal way. This is what I have returned with: StarFire, Harnessing the Fertile Force and the just birthing Earth Lodge that will be used to co-create a Womb Temple.

I know this work is best received in a women’s circle. A safe place where you get to return to long after I am gone and continue the work. This is no quick fix, read a book now you know the solution, stuff. This work goes to the fiber of your being and assists you to re-write your physical reality. When we change the belief, we change the experience.

To share the Love of the Blood, with your community of women, each cycle, deepening your strength, committing to a future lived in harmony with earth, building a more loving life for us all. The abundance that flows from women thus engaged is profound. I want to share a world with these humans. In time our community will begin to recognize the worth of this work too. Making it far less like treason and more like common sense, supporting us to leave off for a day or two, go deep within that one can return with the jewels of self and truly live in truth, with self, other and Earth.

 

A good death story.

Tis been a while between posts. I had a thing to be with. My life was surrendered to the loving of my father for his last few months of life, as well as assisting my daughter to head off for a 5 year adventure. Please, forgive my absence, but it was well worth it.

My father had abandoned me, my 3 siblings and Mum, when I was an 11 year old. During the last 35 years I have known little of his life, his world. Only snippets that would show me he was deeply controlled by his wife, a woman the rest of his family could not fathom either. He spent one year studying up the road from Mum’s house, so he created a fake class to put on his schedule so that for three hours each week, for two semesters, he came to our home, hung out and taught me to drive a car. I was 27.

For the next 20 odd years we saw barely anything of him, till about a year ago when his wife recognized, finally, that her children (same age/older than as him) where not interested in caring for Dad. As his Alzheimer’s progressed it became time for some intervention, directing traffic on the Eastlink was a thing, so after the 8th time he was brought home by a police car or ambulance they agreed to go into aged care. It was in Melbourne, 4 hours away from me, but they were safe.

Then came the call that Dad had struck one of the staff. He was becoming increasingly combative, he was struggling, this was 6-7 months into the care, this was a change that was not going to get better. From what I gleaned from the nurse, Dad’s wife had finally shown her colours/been seen, and was often observed being very cruel and verbally abusive towards Dad, even though he was obviously quite ill now. The nurse asked me to take him away from this, from her. In so many ways, this is what the little girl in me had always wanted to do, to rescue him, to love him openly again.

So, I did all the things. I became the legal guardian, discharged him from Melbourne and set him up in Lakes 12 minutes from my home. When he first arrived he was scared. He was contracted and many felt that he had but days left. I was with him 8+ hours a day, for each bed change, for each meal. I held his hand, gave him loads of Reiki and LOVED HIM for all that I am, for all the permission I gave us both. I enrolled every nurse and aid in that incredible facility to love him too. Gently he uncurled, he softened, he smiled and winked and touched the hearts of many there.

We had six and a half weeks together. I got him a special chair so that he could go out in a taxi. I then took him to the farm, three times, so that he could share just a little of my world, Mum’s world too. We went out on a boat to see the magnificence that is the Gippsland Lakes. Shared a Skype call with his brother who he hadn’t seen in many years. In the middle of the third week, Jasmine left for the UK for the next 5 years. That was a ripping open in the middle, but met and lovingly knowing it is for the most delicious time for her!

We did all the things till it was obvious there was no more to be done. We had lost the life we could have lived together long ago, we were but collecting together the ashes of what was left. Precious ashes that I will treasure till I return them to our home, in Powell River British Colombia, Canada.

As I sent away the chair, as I held my Mum and my Sister through our last evening together, sharing stories of how Mum and Dad met, the things Mum loved the most about him, what we each remembered. Everything slowed down to a state that trusted there was no where else to be, nothing else in my life could be this important to me, to my understanding of living, than to be with my Dad in the dying.

I had been bringing in my laptop every day to watch Sci-Fi together. We had watched all of the 7 Star Wars films, we were working through the second season of Star Trek Next Gen. That morning, I forgot my laptop. It was to be a different morning. I got there around 10am. I sat with him. I sang softly. I read him some of my book. I held his hand. I didn’t stop holding his hand. I assured him he was held, he was safe. Around 12 everything deepened, the energy changed. I cast a little circle around us, just to hold us both gently in this moment. I asked for his Mother, my Granny Good Witch, to come and meet us half way. Her delicious sassy self arrived palpably. I sat with my Father, gently holding his hand as the space between the breaths became longer and longer… till there was no breath, just space. A soft and held death, beautiful in so many ways.

I howled. I howled and howled and howled. I kept holding the hand of a Man I never really knew but never stopped loving. My greatest fear for him, that he would die alone, never realized, because I chose to hold him no matter what. I called my Mum, my Sister, and they were there before I told any staff. Time of death was 12.52pm 19th of October 2016. There was to be no funeral. This was all the space we had to say goodbye in. We stayed till we walked the empty shell down the corridor, out into the hearse. His cremated ashes now rest for a while where I can glance at them to inspire my return home, May 2017. There, then, Mum and Jasmine and I will scatter his ashes with his Mum’s ashes on the property where he and I grew up.

We have so much space for our birth stories, and as I have attended about 8 different births I understand how unique each of them are. As I have lived through this last month, I have come to feel that a death story, a good death story is as important to share. Indeed, many beautiful caring and loving friends have shared their stories and it has helped to rest in the knowing of a very human threshold I have crossed, to witness the death of a parent, a next stage of growing up.

This death was a beautiful moment in time, with ALL the love in it I could hold and much more as it cracked me open, not unlike the way I was cracked open giving birth to my daughter Jasmine. So much Love. So much to Love.

I hope this good death story holds you gently.

I am grateful to have somewhere to share it.

What gives me the right?

In 2006 I stood in front of about 80 year 11 and 12 girls from a local high school. The health teacher had heard of me and my work and wanted me to share what it is that I knew, what it is that I do, with the young women of her school.

I was 10 mins into the presentation, becoming increasingly aware of how hostile the room was getting the more I spoke, until suddenly one young woman stood up and shouted;

“Who are you? What gives you the right to say all this?”

I stood for a minute, a bit thrown by the question. I looked to the teacher that had brought me there, in front of all these girls I was so obviously insulting with my actual presence in the room. The teacher stood up, all angry eye’s now upon her, and stated;

“She’s a woman offering an opinion you will not hear anywhere else. She’s sharing a perspective that you wont find in the mainstream, a perspective that is empowering.”

I am not sure that they believed her, or me, that day. Those 80 young women. For I was telling them a story that had barely begun to be retold.

Here we are 10 years later, and it’s still a story that few are willing to own the authority within to retell it to themselves.

What gives me the right to share “the Love of the Blood” as I put it?

The blood does.

The fact that the power rises up in me each and every time I sit in circle and share… “the Love of the Blood”. Then, after a woman has heard me deep within, when she too can feel the power rising, the right is bestowed upon another woman.

The rights become rites.

Then the rites become rights.

Then, we turn and face the blood, with a whole open loving heart, each moon, each cycle and learn to love the blood. Learn to Share the Love of the Blood.

Our womb’s experience is real and valid and can lead us to incredible understandings of self, other and earth. IF we let it. IF we turn and do the work, face the worlds within, tend to the gardens of our soul self.

If there is pain, listen to it, it is a conversation waiting for you to join in.

If there is ecstasy, then carve out as much time and space as you can to bathe in the bliss, rest in the loving throes of being a woman, whole and sovereign unto thyself.

Return beloved woman, return and build your life from the jewels found within. For you also have the right to share the love of the blood!

 

I have a series of workshops that are part of the Circle Technologies. They are designed to be delivered to your circle of women. Women that you know and love, that are part of your world. If you would like me to share the core of my teachings, the deep juju of sharing the Love of the Blood with you and your sisters in your lounge room, or down here on the farm, please be in touch. StarFire and Harnessing the Fertile Force are life changing offerings that re-frame the very core of being in a bleeding body. Empowering with a whole suite of tools to change the story we have been told for many thousands of years.

 

 

To gather with like minds

There is a whole lot of noise about a group of men, across the globe, gathering. Showing up to each other, becoming known to one another beyond the screen, the digital expression that they have allowed so far. The fact that they share a deeply misogynistic world view, unfortunate.

They could be so much more to each other, with each other. They could be real Kings among men, whole and real unto themselves. Healing and willing to lead further healing of the manufactured divide between men and women. For in truth, there is only the noise that keeps us separate. In reality loving each other is as hard as we make it.

When you hold a child in your arms, witness them grow, you know we are born loving, being loving creatures, when bathed in more loving it all just keeps getting stronger. We have to learn to be cruel. We have to be taught all the ism’s our culture contains, we become what we need to become to get the loving we need to grow. For some that becomes an addictive state of attention seeking that is not met well. For others less vocal we internalize (internal lies) tell ourselves stories about just how unlovable we are, thus creating a world for ourselves we can trust to disappoint at every opportunity, becoming more hard wired into the scarcity of it all.

This is where a group of our own kind, be it men, women or somewhere in between, can share a language where we can discover that it’s not you, or them, perhaps it’s the way that we expect loving to be. Tis hard to share a free and easy state of loving if you have a whole lot of story as to who we each are, and who should be on top.

A group of men, in circle, knowing just how amazing they are from the core out of their beings, that group of men can honour themselves and thus those around them. This is not what I am feeling is happening with the self proclaimed Kings. My feeling is that these men are being weaponized for commercial profit, ego stroking and a kind of frenzy that only delusion can deliver. When you have to keep telling a story, whether it’s that your football club can win, or you are righteous in your acts because you found a bible passage to back you up, to maintain a feeling of frenzy, of fury that feels good to get out, good to be expressed… then you are living in a bubble of someone else’s thought, some would call this a cult.

Cults scare me. I have seen many from the outside, had many a friend sink into one or three only to return with stories of disconnection, disappointment, often debt up the wazoo. Those are just the easy to see ones. There are so many thought bubbles, delusions we keep telling ourselves to try make it ok.

I have never ever wanted to create cult.

I want to build community.

A community of human, all of the ways we wear our human, that reach for what is real. Trust that love is real, an honest part of who they are. Know that our Earth is sacred and creating sacred is a muscle group we can exercise. Recognize that every solution we need, we have, we just need the will to use it.

Being in circle, your circle, the humans of your world that you trust, have built your world near. That circle, connected to other circles, woven like a huge flower of life pattern where each intersects with each other. For me, that feels like community. Each human unique unto themselves. Each circle able to hold themselves and each other sacred. All of us knowing we are part of something much larger, able to create and maintain real change.

 

 

My First Blood Rite.

Locking the doors felt both foolish and oddly securing. I was shaking with the anticipation of what I was to step through. The rite I had conjured for myself felt so very dangerous, as if I was about to step into, through and beyond something that would change me forever. A threshold I could never come back from. This was the point; Really truly deeply changing something took this kind of sacrifice of fear, of terror, as the edges of it were felt through.
Who would stop me? Who could stop me? Who would know? There have been many moments of my life spent this secretively. Times where I would explore something never seen in a book. But ached for by my skin or by my heart, in such a way as to build the entire path to it. Every little detail of the encounter with self, alone and in so many ways All one, every part created with such joy and true abandon.
This here was the passageway to reclaim my blood. I had been using a menstrual cup for a year by then. I dearly loved it and the truth it afforded me, by virtue of its design that I may have such direct contact with my blood. So many questions arose from its use, so many wonderings that my bloodmind would wonder. But it would be years before I would even conjure that notion of my being… the recognition of bloodmind… by this stage I was barely able to see, to smell, to witness the bloods effect on my being… by being safe with it. This was another step along the pathway to understanding why we are so very forbidden from this blessed gift from within.
I had fashioned a simple spell working, from my basic and newbie relations to witchcraft. My sacred tools assembled, I cast circle. I created a sacred space, naked now, dripping in sweat, I sang a simple Goddess chant, The River… returning back unto She Then, taking my menstrual cup from my body, trusting it would be rather full, which it was, I opened to the blessed wonder that was this sacredness and added this cup of blood to my bowl of ochre.
I felt like an original witch. Working with the most primitive of elements, blood and earth. I made my sacred paste. Stirring and blending till the consistency was just right for painting. Singing quietly to myself as I built such an offering, to me, to Her, to the life force that engaged me to continue, to move through any resistance, anything that would tell me this was too wrong, too far away from what is considered “normal”.
Once this sacred tool was ready, I turned and faced each element to ask for the blessings of each quarter. I conjured a power-filled brew, and turned to the mirror to apply it to my being, to reach ALL the way in. I was after what ever had made this feel wrong. I was chasing the tail of the beast that had stolen my first blood and made me fetid, filthy and dirty for being a woman that bleeds. I was chasing the demon that had laid this curse, so that I may shift it within myself. As I faced that mirror, I painted a crescent moon upon my third eye with my sacred blood earth, and knew myself a blood witch. I painted a spiral upon my heart to journey further and further within to the heart of woman.
I felt then, what I do now. A peace, a profound peace where there now lives an incredible life, sharing such life giving possibility of the sacred blood.
That first blood rite led me to the sharing of blood wisdom with many women. A life led deeper and deeper into the flow of what lay within a curse, what lay within the meaning and value we place on being a woman. I have sought the source of the curse in myself, in other women, in the texts that support it to remain. Those still invested in a woman’s perceived weakness rather than making room for the rest of her to be welcome at the table.
What I was after, what I am still opening to, is the state where in my body, the menstrual cycle has the rest of its worth enacted upon. Where I reach into the emotional realms, the heart tools of being whole as woman. Being real in this bloody glory.
I still remember the mortification of realizing a small drop of blood had landed on our rental carpet and the panic of having to explain how it got there to my housemate. I did all that I could to clean it, but in the end I confessed what it was, and how it got there. In testament to our friendship she heard me, and helped me remove my exposure. This beautiful sister became the first woman that I shared what I had learnt from within the blood circle, the first of many. She was to remain a deep sister that held me sane during a time when I could have easily slipped off an edge and been lost. For it feels like there is a madness, an agreement that we break outside of our current thought … a treason we commit by turning to the blood, away from everything else, when we bleed.
I know I am not the first woman to have my attention taken by the flow of wisdom down my thighs.
I know that I will not be the last woman to re-frame my blood, my bleeding as sacred.
I hope that this story touches any woman that has felt this place and had no language for it. For where do we find such a language in the world of men that have never felt the entire dissolve that is menstruation.
Blessings of the Blood, for there are so many!
Katherine Cunningham.