Birth and Soul Food

I have a secret life going on. I am scared.

I woke up yesterday jittery, excited, and on the move. By 6:30 am I had read my book and was starting on my second cup of decaf coffee. The first woman woke up and I was ecstatic. I danced around her, looking for a companion in my gleeful energy. Lisa-Maria looked me in the eyes and held me there, unmoving.

Her centered clarity shook me. It was as if she dumped a bucket of ice-cold water on my head and suddenly my show fell apart. “I am scared. I have a secret life going on.” The words fell out of my mouth before I knew what my secret life was or what I felt scared about. With sleep still in her eyes and her bed-head hair piled on top of her head, she was with me and let me unfold. 

I explained to her how I had been hiding what was going on with me. I told her that my body and mind are on different paths, with different wisdoms to share and opposing choices. My cheeks flushed and I felt scared, but the moving energy still flowed through me and I kept going. I told her how my body has been craving for a baby. That, from deep within my bones and the space just below my heart, I have a magnetic pull to carry a growing life within me. It is like I have a nutrient deficiency that needs to be nourished. My body is aching to have a baby as it thirsts for water. 

My mind, on the other hand, disagrees strongly. Even writing this down for others to read is threatening and absurd. I have always known children would be in my life, but they would be adopted or I would care for ‘other people’s children’ village-style. For my mind, I have a lot of projects, a lot of things to create, and do not have the time, money, or stability to even think in the direction of babies. 

Lisa-Maria listened, finished her coffee with me, and the next woman came into the kitchen. “I am living a secret life and I am scared. Can I share it with you later?” The sentence poured out until I told most of all the women here. Being at the Women of Earth Bridge-House, surrounded by women who love me, are on my team in my transformation, and who speak to the bigness within me, I don’t want to have any more secrets. I want to share, as honestly as possible, what is going on with me. So I am speaking. Speaking the most tender and scary things like, “I want to have a baby.”

On my third round of sharing my secret life, Vera stopped what she was doing, walked out to stand in the sun with me, and listened. She said, “Look, it’s not about babies.”

I flinched. How did she not see how big and different this was and how precious it was for me to say these words to her? She listed the projects I was creating and said, “This happened to me too, before I started delivering my purpose. You are trying to feed your soul with heart food.” 

Soul food is connected to your purpose. What you are here to create and discover. Heart food is all about connection, intimacy, and relating. So far in my life, I have subsisted on heart food alone. All I cared about was who was around me, how the quality of that relating was, and what we could do together. As my hunger for soul food grew, I reached for more heart food. Which helped for a little while, but the emptiness lingered. I turned inward and wondered what I was doing wrong in my relating, why my friends seemed closer to each other than me, and I was occupied with figuring it out and making more plans for connection. I searched for where things were wrong and I found ways to make it so. 

With this clarity things are shifting. 

I have been a sailboat waiting for a gust of wind, and suddenly a storm has rolled in. There is soul food all around me and the force of Creation is tremendous. What do I do with all of this energy? How do I navigate where I am going?

I am finally asking questions to feed my soul.

Today, the urge to have a baby has quieted to a whisper. I have stopped trying to feed my soul more connection and intimacy and am using the energy for my creations instead. I do not know what will be born of all of this, but for now, it’s not a baby.