Confessions from the Womb of the Mother: Miscarriage, Fear, and the War on Nature

A story of death, power, and reclaiming the feminine arts and mysteries

I have a confession to make. 

After my miscarriage in 2020, I slowly backed away from my ritual arts practice. This past year, I have been grieving that separation as I have made a wildly relieving and soul-igniting return to the spiritual and Earth lineages of my ritual tending work, ultimately initiating my move to my soul home of Aotearoa. For someone with a book published on ritual, it's been hard to admit I got so far away from my role in the grander weaving of nature's design, but I know I'm not alone. 

I painfully watched how the pandemic caused many feminine beings to stop trusting themselves and their nature and, as a result, stop trusting the nature of life as a whole, especially when it moves through them as death/spiritual initiation. We already live in a world where women are taught to fear birth and distrust their wisdom, but the pandemic unearthed even more of this fear.

The response to the energy activated by COVID-19 became a war on nature. Fear, control, and scarcity were heightened, hijacking the hearts, voices, and wombs of many women. The Earth responded to collective stagnation with her brilliant ferocity to initiate us into our truth, sending the feminine into her dark night to find her deeper powers there while the forces that try to contain and control fought their way to reign. The pandemic was a collective dark night of the soul we are just now integrating and coming out on the other side of, but women especially were called into their depths in ways many had never experienced before.

About six months before the pandemic, I had a few past-life visions that mirrored the timeline we were stepping into (repeating). I saw past timelines where women and children were swarming in chaos. This was from the annihilation of the sacred, the cutting off of the oracles, and war against nature and the feminine that made life unsafe for the pure hearts who carry the spark of creation within them. The Earth was teaching me so much during this portal of time, but to be completely honest, I feared the power she was igniting through me. I didn't feel ready. 

Leading up to my second conception in March of 2020, I was fully immersed in the feminine arts from sun up to sun down. It was my lifeblood. I made offerings daily, my channels and all the portals awakening through me were opening wider and wider, and the Earth and I weaved together as one. I meditated under my grandfather tree with my plant allies each morning, sang to the beloved river in the afternoon, and channeled songs from the voices of the Earth by night. I was nature's vessel, daughter, devotee, healer, and student. I communed with the little people and the elementals and expanded my capacity for bigger ritual and ceremony as I unraveled ancestral threads, limitations, and reclaimed the keys to my feminine power. I devoted to deeper soul and blood lineage training in ritual facilitation with the ancestors, the little people, and the Earth. I was committed to being a good steward of my medicine and the gifts I was given. I listened intently to my mission, was rooted in my purpose, and in service to the Earth, the sacred, and the feminine.

This was around the time I channeled my book, which was brought through the voices of the little people and the Earth. My book is about the ritual arts and cultivating a relationship with the sacred, which was a big awakening of my voice and purpose in this life. In this portal of post-book writing and pre-baby conception, I received wild prophetic visions about the energy about to wash through the collective feminine. These visions were about being initiated through the realms of birth to learn how to midwife death and resurrect the voices of the wise witches and ancestors within the Earth who were shamed and buried for their power. I didn't fully understand these visions then, but I knew they were important, vital, and clear. But all I wanted at this time was to conceive a daughter. I was ready to be a mother, and my connection to my daughter in spirit had been active and strong for years. Little did I know I would become a mother, just not in the way I thought. 

My guides led me to conceive with the Earth, teaching me that it would connect me to my primordial power as I became a mother. This was important. The same week we went into global lockdowns, my ex-partner and I ventured into the forest near our home. I made an offering to the little people and the Earth mother, drummed and set intentions, and we conceived a child. I knew I was pregnant right away, but I kept it to myself, in awe and nervous to voice the sacred conception I had just co-weaved with spirit. I was in a partnership with someone who didn't understand me and was afraid of my visions and clear knowing, which hushed my expression. I silenced myself a lot as it felt safer for my nervous system, just like many women before me. I continued to weave with the Earth, listen deeply, take in the signs and symbols, and cultivate boundaries for my growing sensitivities.

A couple of weeks later, I was harvesting spring weeds at the edge of the forest by our home on the full moon when I saw a snake in the cleavers. I stood there frozen as I started to feel fear. Why is it that we reactively fear powerful symbols of transformation? The Tower, Snakes, Spiders? These archetypes stand at the threshold of the mystery and ignite what lies in the way of us falling in. They remind us that something must fall away, but change is simply our nature. The more we resist change, the scarier it feels.

Eye-to-eye with this little snake being, I knew it was time to step more fully into the portal. I then told my partner I was going to take a pregnancy test. I came out of the bathroom upstairs where he was waiting and started to feel glimmers of shame mixed in with the low-level fear. I had no context for these feelings as I couldn't think of anything more exciting than becoming a mother and reuniting with my daughter. A few minutes passed, and two red lines confirmed what I already knew. I collapsed at the top of the stairs, eye-to-eyes with the photos of my ancestors on the wall across from me, and started sobbing from a deep place at the base of my womb. It was a combination of grief, pain, and longing that felt old and ancestral. I was confused why so much emotion was being triggered when this was all I wanted. Right? It was like I had two forces within me navigating my experience: the primal nature in me that never lies as it responds to my soul's light, and my ego/mind questioning and judging why I was reacting the way I was, telling me I should be happy, grateful, and excited. 

Overwhelmed by the sudden onset of emotions but intuitively guided, I immediately asked my partner to make a fire outside. Though I wasn't thinking about it at the moment, looking back, I can see that I needed the fire to connect me to my feminine force and desire and ignite my spirit as I moved toward what I was being initiated into. 

As I sat around the fire drumming, singing, and humming, I kept seeing the face of a dear sister, who lives in New Zealand, which came with a knowing that this wasn't right. I wasn't supposed to be bringing my daughter through on these lands in Northern California. I was meant to be drumming and singing around the fire with my sister to mark this moment. I was meant to feel empowered, not ashamed. This wasn't my destiny. How did I get onto this timeline? 

I cried in longing and grief some more as I was coming to terms with the path I chose to be where I was. I was also coming to terms with the idea of free birthing alone in total isolation with no community (that or birth in a hospital during a global pandemic, which was a firm no for me). I did what I could to continuously find my power in a situation disconnected from my genuine divine desire and creative sovereignty. 

Over the next week, I connected to my spirit baby more and more, but it was clear this baby wasn't my daughter. It was a boy spirit, and he told me his name was Micah. I hated the name and felt dulled in these connections, like forcing yourself to connect to family because they are family, but you don't really vibe. I internalized so much judgment for not being happy with the gift of life I was given. I internalized so much shame for not feeling a soul connection to him or being grateful for his messages and guidance, as he was helping me clear some things I needed to clear. The more he came to me in my dreams and visions, precious and beautiful and light as any child, the more he felt like my partner's child, and not mine. I loved him as I love anyone, but he wasn't what I had desired, and he didn’t feel aligned, just like his father.

I realized I had become a vessel for other people's dreams to birth through me, powerful enough to do so as a birther of worlds, but this left me little space for the cultivation of my own dreams and desires as any vacancy in my womb was already occupied by the dream seeds of others.

During my whole early pregnancy, I was having nightmares like I had never experienced in my life. I could barely sleep, and my nervous system was a wreck. I was seeing entities all around anytime I closed my eyes. Entities can make their way into our fields through trauma, ancestral wounds, and a lack of boundaries/containment around any portals to the otherworlds. I not only became a house to nurture the life of my partner, but a house to process fear from his DNA, his ancestral lineage, and the collective at a time when all of the above were running rampant. There was a war against feminine nature going on inside of me, just as there was all around the world.

When we allow others to feed off of our light or take responsibility for the healing (mothering) of others because we do not own our creative energy as the powerful force it is, we deplete ourselves of our fertile nectar, desire, and feminine magic, losing the essence of who we are, as those we are feeding become more vital and resourced at our expense. 

Along with the demonic nightmares that kept me up at night, I was seeing feminine ancestors clawing at my field, begging me to feed them. I didn't yet understand that they were starving for a spiritual nourishment I was also starving for—desire. 

I was guided to do a ritual during my birthday-Earthday portal in April when I was around six weeks pregnant. In this ritual, I took an item from my mother line given to me by my maternal grandmother. I buried it in the Earth at the creek bed with the intention that I was returning to the Earth as my mother source and letting go of the karmic stories, wounding, and malnourishment within my feminine lineage that created cycles of martyrdom. These cycles created suffering in women that led to the loss of creative power, sovereignty, soul passion, and divine desire.

That day, my baby stopped growing.