Between Two Red Lines
“The valley spirit never dies; It is the woman, primal mother. Her gateway is the root of heaven and earth. It is like a veil barely seen. Use it; it will never fail.” – Tao Te Ching
Note to the reader: it is worthwhile to inform you that what follows includes content relating to suicide, pregnancy, spirituality and death. If these themes feel distressing to you in any way, do what is right to be gentle and kind with your body and psyche. Sharing and writing about this is an act of bravery for the writer as well, to share with vulnerability the whole reality of her phenomenal experience.
[ seven weeks ]
**
Two red lines on a plastic test is a quantum collapse into a new reality. X and I found out I am pregnant three weeks ago.
Earlier in the same week, our friend took his own life. It was devastating. Birth and death, grief and joy, seem to arrive intimately together like that. Twin sisters holding hands – baby soft, tender, wrinkled – through the Spirit Valley. The portal gathers a powerful gravitational field that both attracts and repulses bodies in space. People hover around the edges, gauging distance and contact. Those with the resilience of lived experience can withstand more intensity. Their skin toughened with the wisdom of stretch marks and scar tissue; they come closer to the centre.
I want to write about this – it is my devotion to yin research, the intersubjective ethnography of “life-lifing” in this time between worlds. But I have to work through residues of fear around exposing personal experiences of pregnancy, about relating with birth and death, about being so physically confronted with the vertiginous abyss of not knowing and making a leap of faith, again and again. It feels private, tender, and dangerous. Yet it is my commitment to faithfully encounter all aspects of Life as soul-directed research – using every perceptual skill and capacity trained into my being to “see perfectly.” Bonnie Roy reminds me: “everything seen perfectly is loved.”
So I am enrolled into the practicum of deep phenomenology. My body is now activated to become a biome in the continuity of one of most complex and primordial experiments: the cultivation of another human life in the belly.
There is an irony to this. I’ve been working with embodied metaphors of attraction, fertility, conception, gestation, and (re)birth in the practice of disclosing new worlds. Nursing desires and latent potentials in the heat of the belly. Researching patterns of sourcing and guiding creative projects with their own lifecycles and unique agentic desires. Sensing into how we can collectively parent the seedlings of new cultures in this unstable time.
Yet now, I live the primal pattern in forms that are much more physically and biologically apparent, more real. The stakes are explicit in my womb, and in all my most intimate relations – enfleshed and utterly beyond my control.
The most humbling inquiry in this soul-directed curriculum confronts me with a core fear and desire: “what does it mean to become a good parent?”
X always wanted to have children. I spent most of my life feeling ambivalent about it.
From November 2019 to March 2020, I experienced deep intensity of pain and loss of ground (a “dark night”) in a kind of dissociative acceptance of the imminent collapse and suffering in the world. I swallowed the pill of tragedy into my body and it did its work. The ambivalence I felt around children collapsed into chilling clarity: “No, I will not bring a child into the world.”
Yet the soul still nurses its latent desires, hidden away in a chest buried deep. When the pandemic stirred life back into the body: I began to have imaginal visions that I had never encountered before during my meditations.
I would feel myself standing in a dark room with an empty crib and an empty heart. I would feel my hand gently holding a chubby little hand, brushing through tall grass. I would see myself standing at a misty lake, thigh deep in a cold lake, deciding to drown myself after losing my child. I would see my wrinkly hands making homemade tofu at the sink for my grandchildren. I would feel myself on an operating table, feeling life force drain from my body yet relieved to hear a crying baby lifted out of me.
These Imaginal visions would haunt me viscerally – leaving me trembling in wake of both pain and desire coursing through the dark well of my body. I can only write them now for years of dedicated metabolism of these soul images.
A couple of years ago, I watched the film “Blue” (1993) by Krzysztof Kieslowski at a local rep cinema. It is a remarkable film about a woman whose husband and child are killed in a car accident. Her suffering is quietly unbearable. When she finds out at the hospital, her immediate impulse is to end her suffering by taking an overdose of pills. But she is unable to swallow, so she lives. Through the film, thunderous music would suddenly crash through, the blade of grief relentlessly slicing through mundane moments of swimming or looking at a blue chandelier. My heart was continuously breaking as I watched, tears spilling and slipping into my mouth, salt on my tongue. I was affected for days after, hardly able to speak.
The potential of losing a child is the soul’s unbearable image for me. The image packs such a potent envelope of intense suffering that my animal body seizes in the desperation to numb and/or escape. I didn’t know how to respond to these images. My fear told me that I was seeing visions of the future, that maybe I have some form of prescience or clairvoyance that means that I would lose my child if I were to try. What if this was true or literal? For years, I followed James Hillman’s task of “sticking to the image", sitting with and allowing these Imaginal images to cook in the alchemical vessel.
Another relevant artwork was “The Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang (and the adapted film “Arrival”), a beautiful short story about destiny; about a woman – who through the transmission of an alien atemporal language – acquires the capacity to experience all events at once. I resonated with phenomenological blurring of free will and fate, the participatory consequences of recursive awareness on reality-unfoldment. And yet, she says: “despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it and welcome every moment” – including the inevitable death of her own daughter.
I wondered if this was possible for me: to surrender to and choose Love, even when I am due for inevitable pain, heartbreak and struggle.
You see, you don’t need prophecy or clairvoyance to know this inevitability to be true.
This truth connects me to a long and deep human lineage: To give birth into a reality of heartbreak. This is the conscious sacrifice of creating and being bound to Life. To become a parent is to remember this soul contract. It cracks you open to the task of unconditional loving in the vast valley between Self-and-Other – to birth a being from the intimate membrane immanent to and beyond everything. This principle extends beyond human baby-making – any true Creative Act generates more aliveness, it metabolises entropy. You bring Life into the world and know viscerally the true depths of response-ability. Any latent potential that you fall in love with, nurture, protect and guide into actualization is an ensouled being – whether it is a relationship with an art project, an organisation, a culture. You cannot control it, and yet you are helplessly bound, inextricably entangled in your loving.
Falling in love means inevitable heartbreak from beginning to end. Am I capable of meeting this, intimately?
Of all the Soul images that I shared, the most liberating image is also the most gruesome: I am on an operating table, bloodied and giving birth, knowing that I am going to die and accepting reality. I hear the baby crying. It is worthwhile. I relax, returning home. Somehow, this soul image of my own death liberates me into becoming available to the possibility of creating new life.
I know in my Imaginal body: this love is worth dying for.
—
Why do I share all this? Because on the night of May 9th, when I saw the two red lines on a piece of plastic, I was filled with a kind of easeful realisation. No dread. No fear. Some bewilderment, but a quiet and firm: “yes, I’m ready.”
There are aspects of this that feel difficult for me – true sacrifice is still on the table. For the last four years, my core tension is between the realm of spirit: the heavenly path of renunciation and devotion, and the realm of desire: the mundane path of family life. A part of me wants to leave the world and become a Taoist renunciate, seeking heavenly knowledge and harmony among the trees. But my path is also one of alchemy and metamorphosis — to braid the mundane with the divine into a living root bridge of sacred remembering. I put my feet in the pond, and it gives me instruction through the divine tongues of Life.
Pregnancy tells us “things we need to know about the way awakening works — the slow, unfolding, sometimes hidden, always expanding nature of it, the inevitable queasiness, the need to nurture and attend to what inhabits us, the uncertainty about the outcome, the fearful knowing that once we bring the new consciousness forth, our lives will never be the same.”
– From “Birthing the Tao” by Randine Lewis
I’ve been telling my friends and family about becoming pregnant, both place-based and in the liminal network. My parents, my friends, my teachers and collaborators. I told my friends in the Church of the Intimate Web, my kin in Collective Presencing. Some may find it brave, risky or uncomfortable for me to announce something like this so early. Something very pragmatic in me scoffs in response: “Of course I want to share – I do not want to hold this alone!”
I ask for help, yet discernment is critical. What are the cultural transmissions and patterns that I inherit with gratitude? What do I say “no” to and gently release? You see, the journey of pregnancy is an initiatory threshold riddled with the cloying expectations and alienating protocols of Modernity – about what to keep private and separate, clean and safe, protected and planned. We don’t want to be with the messiness of Reality, we hide it from others.
A tender question arises: “Will you hold this with me?”
Last week, I got in touch with Adriana Forte, feeling attraction to the embodied wisdom I experienced in her when we met last fall. Adriana transmits the metamodern wisdom of cycles and is a mother of two daughters. She speaks about the tragedy of interrupted lineage in Modernity and the ways we can ‘repair it’ by collectively guiding one another home. She says to me: “I want to be part of your tribe.”
In her first voice message to me, sent from Australia to Canada, she says:
“When you said that you are allowing yourself to be happy and excited, but without being attached. I know what you mean. But I suppose what I want to offer is that maybe this is a construct of Modernity. Maybe this journey, as it unfolds, will possibly reveal something that is not meant for us to know. Because in my experience, it’s almost not possible to fully be in something with everything you’ve got and not be attached. But then surprisingly, what I found in my life is that when something happens – be it a miscarriage, there are so many other things that unfold in a woman’s journey of becoming a mother, having children and raising them. But whenever something happens, there is this crazy power that arises. There is something natural that happens from the present moment. Where it comes from I don’t know where, like the rooted self. And then it gives strength.”
Adriana then shares the story of a woman in her community, who recently lost her only daughter – fifteen years old – and ex-husband to a car accident. My unbearable soul image.
“We went to this funeral on Friday. It was beautiful, it was a grieving ritual for everything. People were pouring everything in there without speaking. The next day, I vomited because it was so strong. They had an effigy and people could put prayers in it beside the river. And the woman carried her daughter’s coffin, and you could feel her heart, so cracked open. You could feel the tremendous pain, and her words were so compassionate towards everyone. It was this paradox of: I have never been this broken, and never as open.”
I don’t want to hide from this or hold it alone. The raw power of Life is our birthright. I embrace this rite of passage as a call to be intimate with all of Reality. Everything seen perfectly is loved.
I want this. I want to become a mother. I want to parent Potential. I have faith that the most terrifying human experiences – the ones that don’t lift you into the sky, but humbles your naked body into Earth – are portals to rhizomatic transcendance. They are awakenings to the myriad gateways to the Spirit Valley – the veiled space between heaven and earth where the ancestors and descendents of Life dwell together. The Taoists call this the place of the Primal Mother. It will never fail.
Adriana continues:
“One of my teachers would say: Every pregnancy results in birth, and every pregnancy is a rite of passage, no matter what happens to the baby.”
As I write and share my experience, I embrace Amor Fati, the love of one’s fate. I commit to the pregnant body as the earth’s body, as the communal body, all intimately enmeshed together as the apprenticeship of the soul’s re-birth – accepting all of its wholeness, no matter what happens.
And I know, deep in the ancestral marrow of my bones, that parenting the futures we long for is collective and ecological. We learn together. Parenting is intersubjective, primordial to the deepest roots – that which we are called to remember and evolve, ever more deeply, ever more intimately. So I share all of my joy and grief, fear and excitement, concern and nausea — the glorious messiness of parenting potential — all of it into the sacred commons.
All this is offered, into the space between two red lines.
**
between two red lines, a portal
valley between Heaven and Earth
there is space in the middle
joining two threads of fate
Two red lines weave and twist into a winding path
guiding you back to tangled root, bringing you home.
**