Transition

Birthing a world we want to live in

Hello there revolting readers. It’s Saturday. Saturn’s day. A day for resistance, rebellion and banishment of all that harms us.

I want you to stop for a moment. Take a deep breath and count to four. Release it slowly. Now, relax your jaw.

Did you realise how tightly you were clenching? I’m guessing not.

Do it again. Breathe in and count to four. Release it slowly.

Now, relax your shoulders.

Whenever I remind myself to relax my jaw, I remember how much I ask my body to hold for me every day. The world can be a brutal place. We’re witnessing that in real time right now. And those of us who fight so hard to keep the world breathing need to remind ourselves that we need to breathe too.

Now that you’ve unclenched, let’s begin.

It’s been a big couple of weeks, as it seems all weeks are at the moment. There are riots breaking out across the colony known as the United States, with the unquenchable hunger for change taking hold. I don’t know what the outcome of those uprisings will be, but I do know that they’ll change the folks participating in them forever. I wrote about the spark of revolution in the first Write To Revolt post. If you haven’t read it yet, you can do so here. And if you take just one thing from it, I hope it’s this passage:

Spark a match and a flame will burn. But unless the flame is held to something else - something bigger, something more robust and a system with just enough cracks in it to conceal the hot air of life - then it will come to nothing. Maybe you don’t have the resources to strike the match itself. Maybe you don’t know how. Maybe the thought of holding a flame that close to you scares you. That’s okay.

If you can’t be the spark itself, be the hot air of life in the cracks that helps the fire to get through.

We all have a role to play in making the world a better place. We must all play a role in making ourselves worthy of the one place we have to call home. One of my favourite writers currently is

Nergiz

, whose creating a Substack about matriarchy. I strongly recommend you subscribe to it, and read her revolutionary writing about the kind of world we must bring across the portal of possibility and into life itself. As she so beautifully posted last week, “the world isn’t ending. A world is ending. Our job is to midwife the next one.”

The world’s revolutionaries are often called things like ‘flamethrowers’, ‘firebrands’ and ‘warriors’. And while I find value in those words (and take pride in being called them myself), I embrace the beauty in thinking of them also as the midwives of new life. It reminds me of Jana Studelska’s wonderful homage to birth, “The Last Days of Pregnancy: A Place of In-Between”.

She writes:

“To give birth, whether at home in a birth tub with candles and family or in a surgical suite with machines and a neonatal team, a woman* must go to the place between this world and the next, to that thin membrane between here and there. To the place where life comes from, to the mystery, in order to reach over to bring forth the child that is hers. The heroic tales of Odysseus are with us, each ordinary day. This round woman is not going into battle, but she is going to the edge of her being where every resource she has will be called on to assist in this journey.”

*necessary disclaimer that not all who give birth are women - the new world will know this, and our language will reflect it without the tedium of culture wars that serve no one but the reinforcement of women alone as reproducers for the state

I’ve quoted this piece numerous times, but only in the context of birth as we understand it. Perhaps we can think of it as a metaphor for what’s happening now. We are helping to birth a new world, sending a vessel forward into the mystery with no map nor light to guide them home but that of fierce, unrelenting love and the promise that we’ll be waiting on the other side.

Okay, so it’s not the neatest of metaphors. But you get the idea! It reminds me of a song I wrote for my son, about the early days of mothering him and the terrible fear of being unworthy of the task:

Water rushed in, the tide pulled me down

I rolled back a stone, went in alone

And there you were found

A fragile young thing, with a fresh set of wings

And a strange but familiar cry

I didn’t know, how well I would go

But I promised to try

If nothing else, what we have to do every day - what we must do - is promise to try. To nurture. To protect. To grow this fragile thing into something beautiful and strong and full of vision and courage. The song ends:

Now you’re out there, my heart in the wild

Finding your way, night turned to day

My darling, my child

Your ship’s on the ocean, you’re starlight in motion

A bird, who’s learned how to fly

You’ll never know, how far you can go

Just promise you’ll try

My heart is bruised at the state of the world, and every day it seems to break a litlte bit more. But those bruises and cuts are tended to by the most beautiful of human gestures. The willingness from people to try to make this world a better place for us all is a salve.

The system cannot break the will of the people who dare to imagine what dreams may come.

Until next time, remember this:

You’re doing a great job.

I love you.

Keep going.

In love and fire,

Clementine xx