Full Moon's Daughter

they invite us in

I am loving how the site has evolved in such a short time! Thank you all for participating, reading and sharing.

Here is a quick update on what will be happening over the next few months:

• Articles focusing on pregnancy, Midwifery and families will be posted by the 15th of every month. The first article in this series is titled, “Making Peace with Holiday Stress” and provides insight for pregnant women on relationships, setting boundaries and truly taking care of themselves during the upcoming holiday season.

• The featured December article will focus on easy, healthy and nutritious recipes that are perfect for mothers-to-be.

• Every few months I will be calling for submissions from readers. Most recently I asked for birth poetry and received such touching personal stories. The next call for submission will focus on birth art, so get your crafts and cameras ready. You can expect this posting mid-November.

Again, thank you all for participating. It is so important that we have a forum to connect with each other and share our stories.

If anyone would like to see something that is not posted, feel free to comment and let me know.

She is beautiful and strong
She is sensual and unafraid of being naked
She has excellent balance because she is rooted to the Earth
She is dancing because her swollen body wants to move
Her belly is like the full moon and the tides move within her
She smiles because she knows a secret. The secret.
She is a goodess – she can choose whether to bring life or send it away
Her heart is full and swells with blood
Her breasts swell with milk and nectar
Her belly swells with life
She is tender like a deer and ferocious like a tiger
She is radiant and people smile as she passes
She shares her body with her child as Mother Earth shares hers with all of her children
Magick is happening in her and to her and with her

Written by Chandala Tso Shiva
January 11, 2008

Births

We will never have any memory of dying.

We were so patient
about our being,
noting down
numbers, days,
years and months,
hair, and the mouths we kiss,
and that moment of dying
we let pass without a note -
we leave it to others as memory,
or we leave it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.
Nor do we even keep
the memory of being born,
although to come into being was tumultuous and new;
and now you don’t remember a single detail
and haven’t kept even a trace
of your first light.

It’s well known that we are born.

It’s well known that in the room
or in the wood
or in the shelter in the fishermen’s quarter
or in the rustling canefields
there is a quite unusual silence,
a grave and wooden moment as
a woman prepares to give birth.

It’s well known that we were all born.

But if that abrupt translation
from not being to existing, to having hands,
to seeing, to having eyes,
to eating and weeping and overflowing
and loving and loving and suffering and suffering,
of that transition, that quivering
of an electric presence, raising up
one body more, like a living cup,
and of that woman left empty,
the mother who is left there in her blood
and her lacerated fullness,
and its end and its beginning, and disorder
tumbling the pulse, the floor, the covers
till everything comes together and adds
one knot more to the thread of life,
nothing, nothing remains in your memory
of the savage sea which summoned up a wave
and plucked a shrouded apple from the tree.

The only thing you remember is your life.

Pablo Neruda: (from “Fully Empowered”, translation of “Plenos Poderes” 1962)

I never expected to be so moved by the words mothers have sent me. I have chills reading their poems and feel humbled by the greatness of life.

Thank you for this gift.

effervescence hinges the high notes
while dreamy eyes blink
slow light
as fishes float lilac blue;

vermillion wonder flashing
fierce mother-Love through my fatal heart,
piercing the
foggy, breathless dreams.

i hold her softness with
careful memory:
golden glowing baubles,
aquatic gestures, when!

a sudden beam
smashes bittersweet tears
into the ache of Time
(a dilated sigh)

she, my yoko, smiles!

slipping silvery sands
cross my round belly,
over moony breasts;

through the untouched guise
i drift on the magick spell
of yoko’s newborn eyes.

katalin december, 2004
written a week or two after her birth