I often feel as though I have gone underground when I am getting ready to bleed. This moon, I wrote a bit on this experience:
I look askance from the bottom of this mud puddle, gazing through the oil slick rainbow membrane on the surface. Half of my face is fully submerged, a thick skin of wet gravelly earth encasing my left eyelid, nostril, cheek, and slightly parted lips. I do not clench my eye shut or pinch my nose against the swirling grains of sand. I don’t even hold my breath. My face drinks in this rich soup of earth, receiving tiny missives of sensation as the universe of texture seeps into my eardrum, dancing with the hairs that tell my brain which way is up.
My right eye can still see the world passing through the movements of rising and falling, humans and other beings jostling for sustenance, wrestling with delusion, emitting various shades of peace or turmoil. My right nostril flares at the flavors of life, magnified here in this intimate position, remembering how to extract nourishment from liquid as I return to my origins. My mouth lets in a thin stream of breath through the right corner, letting the sounds and colors of the world slip over my tongue and mix with the slurry of mud gathering there.
I press the gravel against the roof of my mouth and grind it between my teeth softly, feeling the crystalline shapes of each tiny stone, whole worlds filled with invisible organisms, mixing with my unique salivary population. There is so much happening in this stillness.
I turn my right shoulder closer to the surface of the mud, feeling my left shoulder, and back roll over the thousands of worlds, galaxies of realities there in the mud beneath me. The surface of the puddle slides up the right side of my back as I move, slowly engulfing my whole body. As I turn my face upwards towards the sky, I bring the mud with me like a blanket and exhale, sinking deeper, until just my lips are above the surface, sipping one last breath of air while my nostrils switch to amniotic mode. As the mud fills my navel I let go of the need for air to survive. I can receive all I need from this mud. In fact, I am this mud, just right exactly as I am.
If the rain comes, creating more watery space between my galaxies of sand and gravel, I breathe into that space, sighing as my color thins. If the sun blazes, reclaiming the water for the clouds, I grow thicker and thicker, getting closer to each microcosm within me. My flavors grow stronger for a time, unpalatable to some, as the life within me blossoms in the heat. Soon, however, all subsides to dust. And when the wind comes, carrying parts of me off I wonder if I should grieve my losses. But then I feel that the wind has dropped me in another puddle, brought another cloud, tickled another round of rain, and there I am again, swirling with the infinity of life that never truly stopped dancing.
There will be a moment when I emerge as a human again, lifting up out of this mud, showering off the million tiny worlds of gravel, and breath air once more. I will walk, speak, and dance again. But for now, I am happily mud.
Sama Morningstar is the founder of the Womb Centered Healing Temple and the author of "Goddesses, Lovers, and Dreams", a poetry book that can be found on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Goddesses-Lovers-Dreams-Alchemical-Poetry-ebook/dp/B07DH9CBC9/
She is currently working on a new book, The Bio-Mystical Womb with an Oracle Card Deck to go with it. You can access a Work in Progress preview of the book and pre-order your Oracle Deck through this Kickstarter campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/biomysticalwomb/bio-mystical-womb-oracle-card-deck?ref=project_build