My Birth - Brushing Feathers
“Faith is lost when we stop acting. We stop acting because we doubt. We doubt because we are overcome by fear of freedom. Fear of freedom makes us sick. To heal we must remember. We remember by putting into practice that which gave us hope and meaning. Hope is a path to be walked, without waiting for destiny to find us first. Just as Beauty is found in Kaos, free will leads us to destiny. Whatever you do with your freedom, it is faith or the lack of it. To have faith you need something to believe in. I can’t tell you what to believe in, but if destiny is already written, why be afraid? Why suffer? Don’t be afraid, child. Believe in yourself. And I say in yourself because that is where true freedom lies. The one that does not understand morals. That which is contagious. The one to live for.”
It's half past seven in the evening and the crows are chattering outside. The same breeze that sways the leaves of the trees seems to carry the daylight with it. The crickets begin the orchestra and the red lamp in my living room casts shadows of objects and houseplants on the wall, as if staging this moment when I think of how close autumn is - the end of light and the beginning of darkness. Today however - perhaps because of the lamplight - I choose to see it differently. The darkness offers intimate instants, like the one I have now with my gray cat, the red light, the shadows and the music of Satoshi Ashikawa. I am also accompanied by my little obsidian egg, which I had for a while buried for fear of its darkness - which is the same as that which I don't know or don't yet understand. That's what scary movies are. We are more afraid of what we think is inside the closet than what is really there, which are clothes and shoes. Sometimes we see things that don't exist, although if they are seen or felt, they do exist. That means that we have the magical ability to create or destroy. Everything you believe in exists.
I started a therapy with the obsidian egg almost a year ago. It consists of inserting it in the vagina at night. It helps to dream and to connect with the subconscious. When you menstruate you have to bury it in the ground to discharge it and just before you start to preovulate, you have to charge it again with the moonlight. So for three months. In the fourth month, you rest and in the fifth month, you start again. This cycle is repeated for a year. At least that is the way I was taught. I paid for a course in Mexico, a territory where egg therapy has existed since before the arrival of the colonists. Women healed their feminine lineage, exercised their vaginal muscles, regulated their periods and surely had a much deeper connection with their bodies than we have today - where we depend almost exclusively on what the doctor tells us.
About three months ago I decided to stop the therapy because I stopped dreaming, I felt very heavy and tired and I started an intimate relationship. I buried the egg and forgot about it for a while. But soon, as if the egg was screaming at me from inside the earth, I remembered it again. I bled for thirty days, as if my uterus was crying.
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I dug up my little black obsidian egg because a few days ago I got a letter from the doctor. I went to read it in the river and I thought: “they are going to inform me that I have a tumor”. I opened the letter and read: "Doctor Paloma has tried to contact you. We inform you that you have a uterine fibroid, which may have caused the heavy flow of blood between periods." Uterine fibroid? I looked it up on the internet and it turns out that it is a benign tumor that a large percentage of women of childbearing age have. Of course the medical institution doesn't know the causes, but they won't hesitate to prescribe contraceptives or remove your uterus if the tumor doesn't stop growing.
I became a little anxious. “I hope I don't lose my uterus,” I thought. Then I said to myself, “If you don't want children, why not remove your uterus, and then you'll stop having problems down there?” But the idea of being without my reproductive system - in what many people believe is the true and only purpose of “being a woman” - made me feel small and without the opportunity to know more about this very intimate territory, which is my uterus, which is my home. I would not want to be without it. I would like to know it in order to understand it, to know how to protect it and to share it with those I invite to enter.
In this sense, on this autumn breezy evening, my living room is my womb. The red light is the blood and Ashikawa is the sound of the flow. I am me and I invite myself in to have a cup of green tea with apple cider vinegar. My cat is my protector, my friend, my familiar. And the little obsidian egg is the tumor, the one we are going to meet and talk to.
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It has been beautiful to see my cat curl up next to me as soon as I have written that he is my familiar. He knows. So do I. He's still here by my side. He always does when I do something with the egg.
At first I had the little egg hiding under my shirt and resting on my lower belly, but right away I thought, “hey, you need to see the tumor, get it out of there. You're in your womb. Now you can see it and talk to it.” It always gives me a little bit of a scare to see the little egg and talk to it. It's smooth and black and when you look at it, you see yourself in it. It's a deep black mirror. You get the feeling that behind it lies a whole world of mysteries and secrets, the kind that are scary precisely because you can't see them. Normally the little egg was inside me, but now we are both together, for the first time, in this house of mine. I took it with one hand and we danced with the flow, which now sounds like the sea. As the egg is dark, it has invited me to close my eyes. Sometimes we see more with our eyes closed. The sound of the sea brought me home, on the beach where I grew up and there I saw myself alone, being a child and playing with the sand slipping through my fingers. In another image I saw my brother, two years old with his black curls, crying and running towards me, his arms raised. I scooped him up in my arms and kissed him on the forehead. A salty tear escaped me. “It's been a long time, Tete!”. He looks at me. He already knows who I am, he's just surprised, just like I am. “Why are you crying so much, are you not happy?”. He stares at me with his big, black eyes. “Do you want to see my kitty?”. He nods his head. We go to my home and I sit him on my left side where Higo, my cat, sits and they both look at each other. Higo doesn't want to be disturbed too much and Tete understands that. He is not crying anymore.
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Where does it all go, everything that we forget? Is there a parallel world in which those memories meet with all that has ever been forgotten? How are they doing there?
A witch once told me that the moment she felt most connected to the All was when she gave birth to her dead fetus. Give-to-light. Light, darkness. Life, death. Where do the children who never saw the light go? Maybe they live in that parallel world. Maybe they are allright there and don't want us to steal their friends, our amnesias. “Don't remember!” they shout at us from the aftherlife. They, too, are pained by remembrance. They too forget. I will be a forgotten memory.
After talking to the witch, that night of All Saints (or All Dead), we the living danced in front of a wall of speakers, under the autumn moon. I had already been dancing for three days, as human beings have always done since there was rhythm, which pumps like the heart. Dance makes love with music and from there memory is born. When the earth opened like a pussy and gave birth to me, I remembered and knew who I was with the All - just like the witch giving birth to death. I knew that where there is freedom, there is no morality or disease. I knew that memory is ancestral and that it resides in all of us. There, in the memory, forgetfulness also resides. The river sang me the lullaby of my dreams while the milky way winked at me. That night I slept home: the Earth, the river, the wind and the stars.
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My tumor is my daughter. I have engendered you with my beliefs, my memories, my fears and my sorrows. My cat wants to eat you, but that would be too easy. I thought that the day I spoke to the witch and then the Earth gave birth to me, I understood. But consciousness has infinite doors and each of them, its price. “Now it's your turn, child,” whispers the Earth. Obsidian comes from the septs of the earth. It is a volcanic crystal. Just as the egg hides the secrets of the womb, the obsidian contains the wisdom of the Earth. How easy it is to forget. How easy to fear freedom. But how exciting it is to know you every day and every night, a little better.
My Birth, 1932 -Frida Kahlo
