Mama Rising

I went quiet. The joyful busyness of the start of the school year, and the shift of the rhythm from long summer days to class meetings and notes and curriculum and cello practices and drop offs barely subsided... Our yearly family holiday to Earth Frequency Festival came upon us quicker than ever, it seemed, and all that school focus collided with building a festival trolley and cooking preparation days for a week of camping and washing and drying and packing and counting out our hard earned money into a daily budget and all this through a heat wave; And then we left at 3am and by 10am I was alone with the kids in an isolated playground in a small town with no nappies and no car and no food and the temperature was approaching forty degrees and Zai was suddenly at a doctors surgery, having caught a nasty infection in the barest nick of time not to be contagious and I had no idea what was going on and then he came back and was in a huge amount of pain and the temperature grew...

All I can do, is write from my heart today. After a mostly joyous, sometimes tempestuous, and nearly constantly exhausting eight weeks of school holidays, today my children returned to school. The oldest is now in Class 5, the second is starting Class One- a significant milestone in the Steiner Education approach and the third joins his brother and sister at the same campus for the first time, in the second year of kindergarten the school offers (the littlest is still tucked firmly under my wing at home). Ready for the new year of school There are days when time loses it's regular pacing and quickens against the social fabric of our family life. Today was one such day. Time is never a constant- in fact, it is a construct, and far less linear than we currently believe. The summer was full of the sweet humming notes  of slow mornings, swims in the river, sweaty days in which we could do nothing but lay around, stories, tree climbing, trampolining and gardening. This ...

I am melting, softly, into a more gentle manifestation of my own being. Reflected by the beauty and curated order of the space, of how I am being fed by the coolness of iced tea and the images of the book I am flipping through and the decor in the courtyard, I feel the shift inside.  I feel the slowing. The final letting go of ideas of how today is going to be, and opening fully to the sacred flow, the day's own energy and how it will carry me and rock me and soothe me, just like the garden swing I am lounging in. I am in my bliss, that small shining light of my healing over the past few weeks shifts again: that quiet but radiant light becomes bolder. It meets this beautiful space as a kindred spirit and I allow myself to fully be here: willing myself to know that I am worth this.   I know that magic is about to be made. The Cactus Courtyard in the Spell and the Gypsy Collective in Byron Bay Photo sourced on Pinterest, because tragically my camera's ...

The Muse, it has been dormant for so long, slumbering within the dark and profound space of my womb. Now she stirs and awakens with eyes alight. With slender hands that betray her agility and strength, she pulls me down towards her. I have been opened; and once more the words, they flow- down through my crown, up from the womb, converging at my heart space and sitting there, growing in power for just a little while--  Until they spill, like fresh and energetic headwaters, out through my hands and flood my world. Photo by  Ahmed Saffu  on  Unsplash And here it is: this cycle's manifestation of the interaction between the Muse and I- the Mama Rising blog. I pray that this project takes breath and grows from the cellular upward, that it may become, with beneficence and light, a fertile, expanding thing. Dynamic, alive, alluring. I humbly ask for the divine light of creation to stream through me, for the support I need in this path, for rest an...

Today’s musings were inspired by the lovely Kate Alexandra - a yoga and mindfulness practitioner and creator of the Radical Self Care Project. Kate’s work revolves around building a reflective, authentic self care process which is as individual as we are. In a pocket of sunny late afternoon time whilst the kids played on the trampoline with water and dishwashing liquid (and only the bare minimum of tears!) I listened to Episode 17 of her podcast entitled “The Big Exhale: Finish the year connected and clear”. The wisdom that resonated most boldly in me, from this episode, was how mindsets can effect our experience of life: the narrative we feed ourselves that will ultimately inform our perspectives, interpretations and the way we meet ourselves in life. There are two broad types of mindset- the growth mindset, and the fixed mindset. The growth mindset is a container in which we can exercise flexibility in our perspectives, where we can soul stretch and be curious abou...

Stars are a beautiful symbol, aren't they? There is magic in sitting out on the earth (especially with a child), staring up at the night sky. I experience an expansiveness that transcends my human-ness when I spend time with the stars. They capture the imagination of my little ones equally, and are often one of the first things my children learn to draw. This simple project will capture your imagination too, and is equally useful for decorating at Christmas time, Winter or Summer Solstice, or anytime you need a little more starlight in your life really! I've stumbled upon something this year. We haven't got around to "preparing" for Christmas until the day before Christmas Eve. We had some half-hearted attempts at our usual advent calendar and the Waldorf/Steiner four Sundays of Advent tradition, which were quickly scuttled by our cats (for the physical centrepieces and candles and such) and by our busyness and overwhelm. So we surrendered, a...

I spend a lot of times not being heard these days. Although that isn’t completely accurate- the incidents of my words spilling out to the vastness of space beyond my children’s attention, priorities and awareness are fleeting, of course. But hanging there, as they are, in space, divorced from me but unanchored in the sea of suspension that is the beyond my children’s hearing and acting; they become potent in a way that is not healthy. They begin to fester and rot and before I know it, as is the way with the silent and omnipresent microbial forces that coat everything in our world, infection sets deep. And thus those unheard words return to me. They have become heavy in their failure to be witnessed. They come running back to me, tear stained, red eyed, snotty all over, and demand my intention. “They didn’t listen!” They wail. “They don’t care!”. (This, of course, the voice of my wounded, wailing inner self combines in cacophany with my actual children’s own wailin...