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Since I was a little girl I’ve felt like the world was going
to end during my lifetime. That might sound like grim doomsday fatalism, but
quite frankly, the news shows my sense to be largely true every day. Ok, so the
world might not end, but rather the “World as we know it” will end. Global climate change, the slow poisoning of
the world’s population by governments and corporations via chemicals,
pesticides, herbicides, genetically modified
organisms, toxins in the air, water, earth and food we eat … the list is
infinite, as are the ways in which people, plants, and animals are sickening
and dying. The world will surely continue long after whatever is going to
happen happens. It will look very different, though, I think. This dying out of
civilizations and cultures is not a new thing. Populations have abandoned their
lands in ancient times for similar reasons – drought, flooding, climate change,
ice ages, over population, war. But the scale of what is going on now is
unprecedented, as is the fact that this is in large part self-inflicted by
humanity. We have nobody to blame but ourselves. I don't know if I should learn all I can in the shortest amount of time to attempt survival
through some sort of solar-powered organic self-sufficiency homesteading revolution
only to fail because the bees and butterflies are all dead and it
doesn’t rain anymore, or whether I should simply sit back with a glass of port and
a box of chocolates and watch it all happen. The problem with both of these scenarios is
that neither takes into account that I have a six year old son.
I think I resisted
having a child for so long because I couldn’t conceive of bringing a child into
a world that was going to end anyway. But alas, I fell in love with my cute
Mexican husband who is 10 years younger than I am, and I had a child anyway at
the age of 37. I actually worked sort of hard to have him, too. I did not get
pregnant as easily as I thought I would in a post-wedding bliss. It could have
had something to do with having had surgery on my cervix days before the
wedding, but in any case, I had to start counting days on the calendar, making
note of subtle shifts in menstrual cycles, checking viscosity of fluids, not
getting up in the hopes that a horizontal path would help those
little trooper sperms find my big old (literally) egg that month. It became an
obsession, this need to get pregnant. Being a shamanic type of believer, I finally
dreamed up that I needed to “call in” the spirit of my to-be child. No baby
spirit was just going to show up in my uterus without a serious invitation,
especially since I’d spent my whole life believing the world was going to end.
Seriously, what baby wants that downer? So one night I laid down in the dark of
our little tiny house, reached my senses out into the cosmos and extended the
invitation to the spirit of my offspring to please come on and take up shop in
my womb. I felt this being coming from far far far away, as if flying in from a
distant galaxy or star system. And to my greatest shock, I immediately
recognized this being from another time in my life. I recognized this being’s
archangelic presence, light, energy, auric colors of royal blue and rich gold.
This spirit saved my life once.
Many moons ago, in 1995, I was living in Atlanta, Georgia,
in a daylight basement apartment in Midtown, with a partner who was an
alcoholic and drug addict. It took me 2 years of co-dependency and a
cross-country move to realize I was in love with her potential rather than who
she actually was, but in that moment my world was very small and very dark. It
wasn’t just the waking up surrounded by empty beer bottles and a dead-weight
body pinning me down, or the snorting crystal meth just to keep up, the
stringing together of lame minimum wage jobs to pay for a night out clubbing
till 6 a.m. No, I was frustrated by something else much deeper – trying to wrap
my slowly awakening consciousness around the nature of “realities” – yes,
plural – that there was more than met the eye, but a little consciousness like
mine couldn’t do much awakening in the toxic environment in which I was living.
It was almost a vicious circle – the more I lived in the toxins, the more I became
aware that something inside me wanted light, and the more I awakened, the more
frustrated I became with the toxic world, and the more frustrated I became, the
more self-destructive my behavior became to try to dampen the frustration and
pain. All of this led me, as it had led me many times previously, to wanting to commit
suicide. This is very complex and there are no simple ways to explain the
thought process leading up to a suicide attempt of which I had had several a number of years earlier. It cannot be explained as simply as “I believe the world is
going to end, so I may as well end it for myself.”
Looking back now, twenty years later, what I remember is
sitting in the dark in that daylight basement in Atlanta, on a folding chair at
a card table in a bland kitchen, feeling sure that I wanted to end my life. I
had reached the bottom and still kept falling. I had been in this place before,
and would learn from my past failed attempts. I was going all the way this
time. I don’t remember how long I sat there thinking those thoughts but what I
do remember clearly is that from one moment to the next without warning or
change in my thought process, I suddenly felt a strong presence behind me. In
those days I wasn’t really savvy to what “energy” is, but describing it with
the terminology I know today, there was suddenly a big energetic presence
standing behind me. As soon as I became aware of it, the presence reached
around me, through me, into me, in what I can only describe as a giant
light-filled hug. I was aware of royal blue and gold colors in the presence, in
the hug. The whole thing may have lasted
only 10 seconds, maybe 10 minutes, I have no idea, but when the “being”
released me from the hug, all of my pain and darkness and suicidal thoughts
were gone, evaporated, released from me in the same moment that the being
evaporated and disappeared. I immediately thought, that was an angel. It was
clear as day to me that an angel had just saved my life. For the past 20 years,
I’ve always remembered those colors, that light, the moment my life changed
really, because forever after that, I pursued a path of healing for myself and
others, inspired to do my best with the chance I was given that day. That
doesn’t mean I haven’t returned to very dark moments, but it does mean that
I’ve sought out new ways of dealing with those dark moments, remembering above
all that change is always certain, and that however I feel in this moment, the
way I feel can and will change in another moment.
So yes, the same angel showed up when I called in the spirit
of my child. Some things are best explained in vulgar terms, so you can really
understand their effect … so , yes, I was shitting myself. Foremost on my mind
was, oh, did you save me so I could be your mother some day? How can I possibly
mother an angel? How can such a gigantic force of Light possibly come to
inhabit my womb? In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever spoken at length about this
story until now, if I’ve ever mentioned it at all to anyone, maybe my husband.
And then I thought, oh god, if this is the spirit that is going to inhabit this
baby, this baby is going to have his work cut out for him. He’s going to have a
big mission, one of those earth-shattering life-changing missions. This isn’t
just some random baby-being passerby deciding to flit into a body for a while,
for a breezy whirl at life. No, this is going to be a biggie. Oh geez. Of
course it would be this, because I believe the world is going to end, so of
course I’d give birth to a baby who is going to have to deal with a big
end-of-world mission. And of course it would be the angel who prevented my own world from ending one day way back when.
I got pregnant immediately. On Candlemas of 2006, on Imbolc
which means “In the Belly” in the Celtic tradition, a day of the promise of the
growing seed, I knew I was pregnant. I remember standing outside the village
church at mass for Candelaria holding my little Niño Dios figure all dressed up
for the blessings of the babies. Everyone in the village brings their Niño Dios
to be sprinkled with holy water, and I remember standing in the blistering
afternoon sun with my frilly sacred baby doll feeling dizzy and queasy and
knowing that that valiant sperm had finally stuck to my weary old egg. I was so
convinced of my pregnancy that I went to a local medical lab for a pregnancy
blood test so I could give the positive results to my husband as a Valentine’s
gift. I was crushed and confused when the results came back negative. I ran out
to the pharmacy and got a pee test – negative. I didn’t understand how I could feel
so pregnant and full of angel spirit come from afar and test negative. I waited
and waited for menstruation. When another several weeks came and went, I
finally went to my doctor for an ultrasound. I drank a liter of water and the
doctor poked around on my full-bladder belly with that freezing cold gel-coated
wand. All he could see is that one of my
ovaries was bloated with “something,” possibly a cyst or tumor, possibly an
ectopic pregnancy. When I went back to
the lab for another more invasive (read: freezing cold gel-coated wand stuck up
inside you) in-depth ultrasound, the dry gentleman there could only tell me
that there was “no sign of life” in the thing in my ovary, thus deducing that
the thing was a hemorrhagic cyst. Back to the doctor, he prescribed hormone
therapy to force me to menstruate. But
still nothing happened, no menstruation. Back to the doctor yet again for
another bladder-loaded ultrasound. He
peered into the blurry black and white screen for a long time and finally said,
“you’re pregnant. “ Little angel spirit
with a big mission must have been having second thoughts to take so long to
show up. My husband was waiting out in the car resigning himself to the fact
that we’d never have kids, that my cystic ovary would explode, all kinds of
scenarios. He thought I was telling him a cruel joke when I gave him the happy
news. I think I was 8 weeks pregnant by
that point and mostly worried that the hormones I’d had to take would have
screwed the kid up hopelessly. Turned out the kid was more than we could have
imagined, even with me knowing where his spirit was from.
As the baby grew inside me, he seemed to enjoy kicking the
crap out of my belly as he got a feel for what a physical body was like. I
could often be seen with odd points poking out of my stretched skin. I climbed
up and down pyramids with him until the very last moment. Supposed labor time
came and went and nothing happened. I think he was getting cold feet about this
whole human experience mission he’d signed up for. I remember dawning my loose
embroidered Mexican blouse over my gigantic belly and climbing up the Pyramid
of the Sun one more time to see if I could stimulate labor at 41 weeks. People looked at me like I was off my rocker.
They probably assumed I was a tourist here and what kind of tourist travels to
Mexico in that advanced state of pregnancy?!
No labor. Not a pain. Not a cramp. Nothing. Could have been because of that cervical
surgery I had had. Could have been because the little guy/big angel was putting
on the brakes. I remembered my good friend Annie had done a channeling of the
birth guardian spirit of the baby (yes, we’re that kind of family) and it had come up that I would have to “retrieve” the spirit of the baby at the time of
birth. In my shamanic romanticism, I had imagined that I’d be laboring in my
hard-studied hypnobirthing, and that I’d shamanically journey out into the
cosmos and retrieve the baby’s soul and bring it into the physical body. Nope.
It was totally literal. Retrieving the baby meant I had to submit, surrender, to the most-unwanted event of a C-section. Literally, cut open the
belly, retrieve the baby. My first thought when they pulled him out was “oh my
god, he’s white!” I know, it should have
been “oh my god, he’s so beautiful” or "he's so angelic" or whatever, but hey, those drugs mess with
the mind a bit. At least the pediatrician had the good sense to say “He’s the
most beautiful newborn I’ve ever seen” since I obviously wasn’t clear enough of
mind to think something nice and welcoming to the world. When my son was about
two years old, he told me a story about how he came from far away in a space
ship, got on an elevator that dropped him down really far. Then he pushed a
button and a tiny door opened that he went through into bright light and then
he was here in this world. His version of his birth story is far more lovely
than me thinking “Oh, the drugs are making my head spin. Oh, my baby is so white.”
I remember being pretty out of it for months, I think. I
remember trying to sleep in the first days home with that stitched up wound in
my abdomen, not being able to tilt even from one side to the other as I laid on
the bed, developing some sort of sleep apnea and the resulting insomnia
producing interesting astral effects … Astral effects such as being stuck to
the ceiling close enough to study all the effects of texture in the white paint
while peering down on my pained sutured body next to a little chick in a Moses
basket incubating under the weak heat of an ordinary desk lamp. Then came the
screaming all night long that comes with the horrible realization on the part
of babies that yes, they are stuck in a human body. The human body is dense and
full of heavy sensation and there is no getting out of it until death do us
part. I think my baby screamed most of the day as well. The world was so
unappetizing to him that he quickly developed colic and gastric reflux, which
basically meant projectile vomiting every time he was reminded that he lives on
Earth now. I had abundantly creamy milk that I was proud as can be to be
producing, but the only way I could get it into him was to jog around the 3
rooms tiny rooms of our tiny house bouncing him up and down, practically
shaking him. That was the only way he’d stop crying for a second and drink up. I
ended up having to give him all that anti-puke medication they give babies, but
the only thing that really helped the colic was a natural remedy I mail-ordered
from the States that had vegetable carbon in it. It was quite a sight when he puked that up –
black vomit – but for the most part he kept it down and it helped him relax his
anguished belly.
After a few months he started settling into his body a bit more
and became the most observant baby, always wanting to view the world from the
safe space of the snugli pouch I’d strap him into on my chest. He loved for me
to take him everywhere I went, to the veggie shop, the chicken shop, up and
down the street. This is not common at all here in Mexico. People don’t take
small babies out of the house much unless they’re completely covered from
public view, in part to protect them from the perceived threat of the elements
where a stray draft might touch the baby, but also to protect them from the
perceived threat of the evil eye. I later found out the latter perceived threat
was actually real, but that is another story. Meanwhile I bedecked (and
continue to do so) my baby with red threads and amber, turning his undershirt
inside out, following the usual order of anti-evil eye amulets and protective
business while showing my baby the world he was so wide-eyed and eager to see. It
is odd to look into the eyes of such a small drooling fussing pooping puking creature
and imagine him to be inhabited by an angel light being. I think all humans look at their babies and
see little cherubs in their cuteness, yes, but not the vast angelic light being who had come from afar to save my life. That seemed
impossible. Only time could tell, and meanwhile I was too busy changing diapers
and producing creamy milk to worry too much about the world ending anymore. In
fact, I was too busy at that point to think about how I would eventually parent
an angelic multi-dimensional being stuck in the body of a little boy. Ah … but
time would tell, time would tell. Time would challenge me to buck up and see if
I could stick it out long enough without giving up on the "ending" world and
give this kid a life, not to mention some answers!
... TO BE CONTINUED ....
