From Mother Blessings to Red Tent Circles: What comes after a Sacred Pregnancy?

Jun26

In 2008, a small postcard at the local Unitarian Universalist church caught my eye. It was for a Cakes for the Queen of Heaven facilitator training at Eliot Chapel in St. Louis. I registered for the training and went, driving alone into an unknown neighborhood. There, I circled in ceremony and sisterhood with women I’d never met, exploring an area that was new for me, and yet that felt so right and so familiar. I’d left my two young sons home for the day with my husband and it was the first time in what felt like a long time that I’d been on my own, as a woman and not someone’s mother. At the end of the day, each of us draped in beautiful fabric and sitting in a circle around a lovely altar covered with goddess art and symbols of personal empowerment, I looked around at the circle of women and I knew: THIS is what else there is for me.

My work following the birth of my first son came to center heavily around pregnancy, birthing, and breastfeeding, the stage of life in which I was currently immersed. I’d wondered several times what I would do when those issues no longer formed the core of my interest and personal experience. How could I ever stop working with pregnant and birthing women? How could I stop experiencing the vibrance and power of pregnancy and birth? Would I become irrelevant in this field as my own childbearing years passed me by? Looking around the room at Eliot at this circle of women, only two of whom were also of childbearing age, I knew: my future purpose would be to hold circles like this one. I found something in Cakes that I needed, the recognition that I wanted to celebrate and honor the totality of the female life cycle, not just pregnancy. As a girl, I loved the mother blessing ceremonies my mom and her friends held to honor each other during pregnancy. They hosted a coming of age blessingway for all of their early-teen daughters as well and I helped to plan a subsequent maiden ceremony for my younger sister several years later. Locally, we carried that tradition forward into the current generation of young mothers, holding mother blessings for each other and enjoying the time to celebrate and share authentically and deeply. After my training, I facilitated a series of Cakes classes locally, attended a women’s retreat at Eliot Chapel, and began to facilitate quarterly women’s retreats for my friends. One of my stated purposes was to honor and celebrate one another without anyone needing to be pregnant. Somehow, even though our own local mother blessing traditions were beautiful, we had accepted that the only time we had ceremonies with one another was when someone was pregnant. I wanted to change that!

This year, my offerings has expanded from the women’s spirituality retreats and classes I held in my own home, to a Red Tent Circle held at WomanSpace in my nearby town. Our local Red Tent Circle definitely doesn’t focus exclusively on menstruation or on currently menstruating women (all phases of a woman’s life cycle and her many diverse experiences and feelings are “held” in that circle)–in fact menstruation sometimes barely comes up as a topic—however, one of the core purposes of our circling together is in celebration. We gather together each month to celebrate being women in this time and in this place, together. As I noted, I started out my work with women focused on birth, breastfeeding, and postpartum. While those are formative and central and important life experiences for many women, it became very important to me to broaden my scope to include the totality of women’s lives, not just pregnant women. I want to honor and celebrate our whole lives, not just pregnancy and birth. Having a mother blessing ceremony during pregnancy is beautiful and important and special, but I feel like that care, attention, value, and ceremony can be brought into the rest of our non-pregnant lives through gathering together in a Red Tent Circle. This is one reason why I developed an online Red Tent Initiation Program. This program is designed to be both a powerful, personal experience AND a training in facilitating transformative women’s circles. These circles bring the sense of celebration and power we may have experienced during our pregnancies and from our Mother Blessing ceremonies more fully into our lives as the honor the fullness and completeness of women-in-themselves, not just of value while pregnant.

“I long to speak out the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women.” –Ruth Benedict

“I believe that these circles of women around us weave invisible nets of love that carry us when we’re weak and sing with us when we’re strong.” –SARK, Succulent Wild Woman

I am inspired by the everyday women surrounding me in this world. Brave, strong, vibrant, wild, intelligent, complicated women. Women who are also sometimes frightened, depressed, discouraged, hurt, angry, petty, or jealous. Real, multifaceted, dynamic women. Women who keep putting one foot in the front of the other and continue picking themselves back up again when the need arises.

I feel like my interest in social justice, women’s rights, and human services are intimately entwined with my spiritual life. Indeed, I almost cannot separate the two. I believe it is possible for us to have a truly loving world—a world in which the inherent dignity and worth of girls and women is not in question–and there is much good work that needs to be done in order for this world to be a reality.

This work I am now doing, both in person and online, represents an integration of something I feel with my mind, heart, and spirit. My whole being. At that Cakes training years ago, I glimpsed the multifaceted totality of women’s lives and I longed to reach out and serve the whole woman. My range of passion has extended from pregnancy and birth to include the full woman’s life cycle, rather than focusing exclusively on the maternal aspect of the wheel of life as I did for ten years. I create rituals that nourish, plan ceremonies that honor, facilitate workshops that uncover, write articles that inform, and teach classes that inspire the women in my personal life, my community, and the world. This is what else there was for me.

So, after you’ve experienced a sacred pregnancy filled with ceremony and ritual and celebration, what else is there for you? After you’ve worked for years with pregnant and birthing women to honor and celebrate them in their tenderness and strength, how might you branch out to hold space for all of women’s experiences and the many transitions of their life cycle? Like me, you might find your answer in holding a monthly women’s circle.

Learn more about our Red Tent Initiation Program, this in-depth online class is designed to be both a powerful, personal experience AND a training in facilitating transformative women’s circles.

Wisdom from Moon Time for Red Tents

Jun8

“At her first bleeding a woman meets her power.
During her bleeding years she practices it.
At menopause she becomes it.”

(Traditional Native American saying)

One of my favorite books to have available on the resource table of our local Red Tent Circle is Moon Time, by Lucy Pearce. I reviewed it in this post, but didn’t have room for all the juicy quotes I wanted to share! One of the ideas I include in my own Red Tent Resource Kit book is to use womanspirit wisdom quotes to stimulate a discussion in the circle. Here are some quotes from Moon Time that would make great launching points for a sharing circle at the Red Tent:

“It is my guess that no one ever initiated you into the path of womanhood. Instead, just like me, you were left to find out by yourself. Little by little you pieced a working understanding of your body and soul together. But still you have gaps.”

Questions for circle: Were you initiated into the “path of womanhood”? What gaps do you feel?

“You yearn for a greater knowledge of your woman’s body, a comprehensive understanding of who you are, why you are that way. Perhaps you have searched long and hard, seeking advice from your mother, sister, aunts and friends, tired of suffering and struggling alone. You may have visited doctors, healers or therapists, but still you feel at sea and your woman’s body is a mystery to you. Or maybe you have never given your cycles a second thought … until now.”

Questions for circle: What do you feel like you need to know about your body? What mysteries are you uncovering?

“Through knowledge we gain power over our lives. With options we have possibility. With acceptance we find a new freedom.

Menstruation matters.”

Question for circle: How does menstruation matter?

Additional information about why menstruation matters on a physical, emotional, and relational level:

We start bleeding earlier today than ever before, with girls’ first periods occurring at 12.8 years old now, compared with 14.5 years at the beginning of the last century. Coupled with lower breastfeeding rates, better nutrition and fewer pregnancies, women now menstruate more in their adult lives than at any time in our history.

From the age of 12 to 51, unless you are pregnant or on the pill, every single day of your life as a woman is situated somewhere on the menstrual cycle. Whether ovulating or bleeding, struggling with PMS or conception, our bodies, our energy levels, our sense of self, even our abilities are constantly shifting each and every day. And yet nobody talks about it…

via Moon Time: Harness the ever-changing energy of your menstrual cycle

As I noted in my review, one of the things this book was helpful for to me personally, was in acknowledging myself as a cyclical being and that these influences are physical and real:

Each month our bodies go through a series of changes, many of which we may be unconscious of. These include: shifts in levels of hormones, vitamins and minerals, vaginal temperature and secretions, the structure of the womb lining and cervix, body weight, water retention, heart rate, breast size and texture, attention span, pain
threshold . . .

The changes are biological. Measurable. They are most definitely not ‘all in your head’ as many would have us believe. This is why it is so crucial to honour these changes by adapting our lives to them as much as possible.

We cannot just will these changes not to happen as they are an integral part of our fertility.

From there, another relevant quote:

“There is little understanding and allowance for the realities of being a cycling woman—let alone celebration.”

Questions for circle: What allowances do you make for yourself as a cycling woman? Are you able to celebrate the experience?

In my own life, I’ve had to reframe my understanding of the impact of the monthly moontime experience by looking at it through the lens of healthy postpartum care following birth—it is crucial that we care for our bodies with love, attention, respect, and time. Our local Red Tent Circle definitely doesn’t focus exclusively on menstruation or on currently menstruating women (all phases of a woman’s lifecycle and her many diverse experiences and feelings are “held” in that circle)–in fact menstruation sometimes barely comes up as a topic—however, one of the core purposes of our circling is in celebration. We gather together each month to celebrate being women in this time and in this place, together. I started out my work with women focused on birth, breastfeeding, and postpartum. While those are formative and central and important life experiences, it became very important to me to broaden my scope to include the totality of women’s lives, not just pregnant women. I want to honor and celebrate our whole lives, not just pregnancy and birth. Having a mother blessing ceremony during pregnancy is beautiful and important and special, but I feel like that care, attention, value, and ceremony can be brought into the rest of our non-pregnant lives through gathering together in a Red Tent Circle. This is one reason why I’m so excited to offer an online Red Tent Initiation Program this summer. This program is designed to be both a powerful, personal experience AND a training in facilitating transformative women’s circles.

Back to Moon Time quotes!

“There is no shame in tears. There is a need for anger. Blood will flow. Speak your truth. Follow your intuition. Nurture your body. But above all … Let yourself rest.”

Questions for circle: Do you allow yourself anger and tears? Do you feel shame? How do you speak your truth? How do you give yourself time to rest?

To be clear, I wouldn’t use all these quotes at one Red Tent Circle! I would use them individually at different gatherings. This one blog post has enough potential circle discussion prompts to last for more than six months of Circles! 🙂 This month I also bought a bundle of copies of Moon Time to have available for women at our local Red Tent.

More good discussion quotes here: Talk Books: Cycle to the Moon | Talk Birth.

And, there are others in my Red Tent Resource Kit.

Please consider joining us this summer for the Red Tent Initiation Program!

Introducing…Papatoto!

Jun5

“When he becomes a father, a man leaves behind his life as a single individual and expands into a more inclusive role. He becomes a link in an unbroken chain. And in doing so, he himself undergoes a birth process–the birth of himself as a father.”

–John Franklin (FatherBirth)

Just in time for Father’s Day, we’ve finished our first ever father-baby sculpture. This seated father and child sculpture is 3 inches and colored with a beautifully swirly mica pigment. He is custom created in the color of your choice by request in your order (color choices: blue, turquoise, russet, lavender-gold, rose-gold, gold, bronze, copper, gold-bronze, purple, or green). He is a nurturing, loving figure! Papatoto means “fatherbaby” and represents the continued, symbiotic, connected relationship between parent and child that begins in the womb.

This fatherhood sculpture was created in collaboration with my husband to capture the father-child bond and how the baby learns to explore the world from the secure base of daddy’s lap. A new standing father with child on hip is coming next.

Birth affirmations for fathers coming up as our next newsletter freebie, so make sure you’ve subscribed!

“Nurturing is not a genetically feminine attribute. Tears and laughter are not the province of women only. The last time I looked, men had tear ducts. They had arms for holding babies. They cared about their children. And they cried at births…let the shared experience of childbirth reclaim the human soul.”

–-Ariska Razak (midwife and healer)

Creative Ceremony Academy

May18

The Creative Ceremony Academy is a community of members who celebrate lifecycle transitions and pivotal moments through art and ceremony and use artistic expression as our means of story-telling and experience-sharing. We create art and ceremony in order to “tell about it.”

Upcoming classes from the Creative Ceremony Academy branch of Brigid’s Grove:

Facebook Group!

If you want to make sure you see our posts regularly, to engage with the birth art community, and to ask questions or share ideas about seasonal rituals, mother blessings, women’s ceremonies, or life cycle ceremonies in a safe space, feel free to join our new Facebook community! You will also be the first to know about new classes, books, and projects and will get sneak peeks of new sculpture designs and special bonuses not available to the general public. It is here that we’ll also offer rock bottom deals on sculpture seconds! (i.e. we’ve got a bunch of our Squatter’s Rights figurines with flawed hands right now. I don’t want to list them all separately on etsy, so they’re going to be offered on our FB group for a bargain bin price!)

New Squatter’s Rights Sculpture

May11

“Birth is not an event; it’s a series of sophisticated biological processes… Really, we’re talking about processes that should make us fall on our knees in awe.”

–Suzanne Arms

In our May newsletter from Brigid’s Grove, we introduced our new “Squatter’s Rights” sculpture of a mama catching her own baby. This sculpture has a lot of personal significance to me and I have found her image tremendously empowering for a long time. I have made a variety of different versions all expressing the same message: reach down and catch what’s yours.

…Would the new child coming from me be slippery like soap? I rubbed my fat belly. I loved each pound I gained, each craving I had, and every trip to the bathroom. Okay, maybe not every trip to the bathroom. But, I loved this growing baby. Tucked away like a pearl in the sea just waiting to be discovered. I was in a constant state of marvel.

Would I be able to physically do this? No, I don’t mean the labor, nor do I mean the birth. I knew I could do that. I got lost in thought as I planned in my head every moment that would come after my body did the work of labor. The moment would come once my body was ready and the crown of a child’s head pushed itself from me, the moment the child would emerge. That’s what I was planning for; I planned to catch my own baby…

via Guest Post: Squatter’s Rights | Talk Birth.

It is hard to express how much I love knowing about how these figures “speak” to the women who receive them. I started making them to express something within me and to speak to myself or remind me of my own power. I absolutely love knowing that they carry these messages to other women as well, not just me! An early customer of the Squatter’s Rights sculpture gave me permission to share her feedback on it:

I LOVE THIS!!! ❤ I JUST got my lovely statue, she’s gorgeous, I am in awe of your work, and I caught myself choking up a bit at how I look at her and it pulls me back to that most empowering of moments, Me-birthing my little rainbow.. Completely uninhibited.. THANK YOU!…They will be in a sacred space, helping watch over me as I go through Midwifery school… ❤ Thank you, thank you!! ❤

What a tremendous honor to be a small part of another woman’s journey in this way. It feels like a sacred trust.

Small Business Saturday: Shining Year Meditation and International Women’s Day

Mar7

Our collaborative business planning and progress is so intimately tied to our work with Leonie Dawson’s annual workbooks, that when I saw the theme of this year’s workbook—Create Your Shining Year—the wheels starting turning about how to communicate that in a pendant format. A friend then made the suggesting of making a Shining Year pendant with a sun at her center, so I found a sun stamp and set out to create some Shining Year goddesses. I also wanted to make a connection to the sun symbols used in Womanrunes, which are about laughter, healing, and letting go—all messages I need to receive into my own life this year!

Shining Year Goddess meditation

Take a minute to put down anything else you are carrying, doing, or thinking about. Let your shoulders relax and release. Let the breath move easy down into your belly. Then smile. Smile from your roots up through your branches. Feel joy suffuse you, filling you, bathing you, and laugh. Laugh from your belly. Laugh from your heart. Laugh with the wild abandon of freedom and release.

Let go. Feel the release and freedom that comes with unclenching your life. Remember to trust yourself and what makes you smile. Are you afraid to laugh? Are you scared to let go? Do you fear the loss of control that comes with hilarity? It is time to shake that off. Don’t be afraid. Laugh, sister, laugh. It is time to have some fun!

Know that you are as free as you allow yourself to be.

Why the twisty legs?

Recently the same friend who suggested the sun image, asked me why some of my pendant sculpts have twisty legs and I realized that sometimes the why I’m trying to communicate through my work isn’t always immediately interpretable! To me, the spiral leg form represents the energy of rising. I think of these goddesses as joyfully dancing, twirling, expressing themselves actively and energetically in the world. Indeed, the sensation of moving energy is so palpable through this design, that as a high-energy person, I have to be careful how and where I wear them, because the sense of being activated is so strong with them, that it can be too much for me! However, if you feel in need of activation and mobilization, however, then these dancing, moving, energetic goddess pendants are the designs for you! Any of my pendants with dancing legs represent Shakti rising in an energetic dance of creativity, freedom, and personal power. She is unapologetically fully inhabiting her own personal power and her being is enlivened by an exuberant flow of passionate, inspired energy.

Other new designs

As you may glimpse in the opening image, we’ve also created two new miscarriage mama goddess pendants, a new dancing moon goddess, and a mastectomy goddess pendant.

We’re excited to have donated several pieces of our work to a Red Tent fundraiser project in the UK. Please check out all the details about the Community Red Tent and join supporters from around the world for the online auction taking place via Facebook on the spring equinox: Community Red Tent Auction & Raffle

In honor of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, we’re also offering a 10% discount code on any of the items in our shop through March! Use SMALLBIZSATURDAY.

Adventures in Placenta Craft

Feb9

For the past several weeks, we’ve been trying to make a placenta jewel using some of the leftover encapsulated placenta from Tanner’s birth. Why, you may ask? Three possible explanations come to mind:

1. Why not?
2. Freaking awesomeness
3. Awesome freakishness

As my oldest son said when he saw it, “yeah, that’s totally normal.”

It took several attempts before we got a result we were happy with. First, we used our regular clear casting resin and it turned out extremely bubbly:

Mark also poured some into one of our pendant molds and made a little placenta scrap-goddess:

The dehydrated placenta “sunk” in the resin and concentrated at the bottom (front) of the mold. The bubbles of this initial attempt make it look “fizzy” and opaque rather than clear and jewelly. Mark hadn’t put the first attempt into the vacuum chamber he built (which reduces bubbles) and so the next attempt he did put in the chamber. Additionally, we added some russet pigment to it to see if that would look cool…

Not only did it not look cool, but it bubbled up in an extremely dramatic way that we’ve never seen resin do before and created a very weird mutated effect.

The back of the puffed-up jewels looked a little cool, but not cool enough.

We hypothesized that the weird bubbling must have been a reaction to having organic material in with the resin. We almost gave up, but I did a little research and decided to give jewelry resin a try instead of the casting resin we’d been using. It was expensive for only a small bottle of jewelry resin, but it gave us much better results!

There are still some fine bubbles, but it is much clearer and better looking. The scrap goddess turned out better too:

Finally, we had a placenta jewel good enough to set!

Returning to the question of why do this, I come back to a quote I use at mother blessings:

The memory of [my child’s] birth has become a talisman that I hold in my heart as I journey deeper and deeper into motherhood. For these moments come again in every mother’s life—the times when we are asked to walk straight into our pain and fear, and in doing so, open up to a love that is greater than anything we ever could have imagined: all life’s beauty and wonder, as well as all the ways that things can break and go wrong…Again and again, motherhood demands that we break through our limitations, that we split our hearts open to make room for something that may be more than we thought we could bear. In that sense, the labor with which we give birth is simply a rehearsal for something we mothers must do over and over: turn ourselves inside out, and then let go…

via Blessingway Readings & Chants | Talk Birth.

Birth art and birth jewelry can be a tangible “talisman” of our birth journeys. We can draw upon past moments of strength for inspiration and encouragement and affirmation during current struggles. During the day, I am fond of carrying around the birth goddess sculpture that I held during my labor with Tanner and I usually set her by the bed at night. She reminds me of what I am capable of. A placenta jewel pendant offers the same affirmation and connection.

You know how it is said there is no medal for giving birth?

I disagree…

—

*We’re not really planning to market these for sale, but are willing to consider special requests for friends or friends of friends. Due to the multi-step casting process involving multiple days of work, a pendant like this would be $45. 🙂

Sign up for the Brigid’s Grove Newsletter for resources, monthly freebies, art, and workshop announcements.

A Rainbow Girl Turns Four!

Jan19

Beginning at 4:00 this morning, Alaina started randomly exclaiming, “it’s my birthday!” and then conking back out. She didn’t actually get up until about 9:30 and we had an epic birthday day.

I don’t have time for a long birthday post and I almost decided not to make one at all, but I figured a couple of pictures can’t hurt (my weekly grades can wait just a little longer. It is still Monday, after all)!

We originally planned to have a tea party for her, but then I got out my American Girl Tiny Treasures book to give away a duplicate to a friend’s daughter and I fell in love with the tiny, tiny pies made in bottle caps (for dolls, not edible). So, I decided we’d make tiny foods and have a tea party. Then, we were at Wal-Mart getting groceries and I saw tiny pepperoni in the meat department. That was it. I suddenly became obsessed with also getting real tiny foods to eat at her party. I had to rein myself in when I was picking up fingerling potatoes to make tiny baked potatoes. We had (frozen) tiny waffles and pancakes for breakfast and we made tiny pizzas using english muffins and the tiny pepperoni for lunch. We also had tiny chicken noodle soup (lipton instant pack with those little noodles) in tiny bowls. I got petite baby carrots and tiny oranges (cuties) and mini candy bars and Ritz bits peanut butter crackers. Then, at the tea party we had mini cupcake strawberry shortcakes and ice cream cups and my mom made tiny whoopie pies with delicious nutella cream filling. It was really overplanning to try to make pretend tiny foods too, but we did it anyway and I still love the tiny pies. I want to start a new Facebook page called The Tiny Piemaker. 😉

Here’s the pictures I did get:

Tiny food prototypes

Real tiny cakes and whoopie pies waiting for tea party

Talented party guest made these!

Zander’s tiny cake

More cakes by Zander.

Tiny salad and cookies by Lann

After guests left, we had tacos for dinner and watched Frozen. When her aunts called to tell her Happy Birthday she yelled, “it is still my birthday and we’re having birthday tacos!”

This four-year old girl is funny and smart-alecky, and tough and trying, and smart, and brave, and cute, and sometimes bratty, and sunshiney. She likes My Little Pony and princesses and Spiderman and super heroes and felt food and Ben 10 and playmobil. She drinks cow milk like it is going out of style and balks at eating almost everything else. She loves her brothers and sometimes torments them, especially Zander. She is very, very, exhaustingly particular about her clothes. She still snuggles to sleep on my arm (or as close to it as she can get) every night. She loves having books read to her and playing babies with her friends. Her goals for the new year were to play with Tom (my dad) and to have cotton candy.

Happy birthday to my wonderful treasure of a rainbow girl! Here’s the link to her birth story:

“She was pink and warm and slippery and crying instantly—quite a lot of crying, actually. I said, “you’re alive, you’re alive! I did it! There’s nothing wrong with me!” and I kissed her and cried and laughed and was amazed. I felt an intense feeling of relief. Of survival. I didn’t realize until some moments later than both Mark and Mom missed the actual moment of her birth. Mark because he was coming around from behind me to the front of me when I moved up to kneeling. My mom because she went to stop the phone from ringing. I had felt like the pushing went on for a “long” time, but Mark said that from hands and knees to kneeling with baby in my hands was about 12 seconds. I don’t know. Inner experience is different than outer observation. What I do know is that the moment of catching my own daughter in my hands and bringing her warm, fresh body up into my arms was the most powerful and potent moment of my life…”

Alaina’s Complete Birth Story | Talk Birth.

Edited to add: of our tiny goods, Lann just exclaimed, “We love these! We’re going to keep them for a long time and our own kids can lose them later!” 😉 And, Alaina, “this is my first birthday in a year, so I’m so happy!”

Earlier in the day, I shared this bday anecdote on Facebook: Alaina and Zander clash kind of a lot lately. Just now after fighting over Alaina’s b-day playmobil castle: “Daddy! Come here. You need to blame Zander for something!”

Thursday Tidbits: The Return

Jan15

Two months after Tanner’s birth, I still feel like I’m “coming back” from this trip.

And, speaking of returning, last night I went back to teaching my in-seat class. I am grateful to have a husband who accompanied me to keep the baby close on site for nursing as well as for helpful parents who rearranged their schedules/lives to take care of our other kids while we were gone.

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At class last night.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I’d mentally prepared to be “off” until January and now that it is January, I have a feeling of being sped up in an unpleasant way. So, I appreciated reading this essay and the reminder: you just had a baby.

You just had a baby.

So, let’s stop pretending like that didn’t just happen.

And let’s give you some grace and permission.

You don’t have to answer every email, every text or every invitation that comes your way. You don’t have to keep your house clean or make fancy dinners this week or plan your family vacation for the year. You don’t have to take your toddler to the dentist or figure out how to save for college right now…

You Just Had a Baby | Ashlee Gadd.

While I do keep up with a large variety of projects, ideas, communication, and relationships, there is not a single day that passes that I don’t drop a ball, forget something, let something go (intentionally or not), or let someone down. There are emails I don’t answer, calls I don’t take, and text messages I don’t respond to as well as laundry I don’t fold and piles of clutter than don’t get put away, not to mention all the blog posts I don’t write. This simply has to be okay. I’ve joked with friends and with Mark that my “word of the year” should actually be “ruthless,” meaning that I must be ruthlessly assessing of how I spend my time, ruthless about cutting out non-essentials. Every day involves a pile of choices and some of them are hard to choose between, or to not choose. I must be ruthless in my discernment—choosing wisely, choosing carefully, choosing mindfully. My real word of the year is “grow,” while at the same time the message I’ve frequently been picking up in moments of synchronicity and surprising overlap is “let go.” So, maybe I’ve actually got a trifecta of words this year!

I already wrote about the breastfeeding brain in a recent past post, but it appears that there are permanent changes to the maternal brain as well:

The artist Sarah Walker once told me that becoming a mother is like discovering the existence of a strange new room in the house where you already live. I always liked Walker’s description because it’s more precise than the shorthand most people use for life with a newborn: Everything changes…

The greatest brain changes occur with a mother’s first child, though it’s not clear whether a mother’s brain ever goes back to what it was like before childbirth, several neurologists told me. And yet brain changes aren’t limited to new moms…

via What Happens to a Woman’s Brain When She Becomes a Mother – The Atlantic.

And, speaking of mothers and their childbearing brains, Childbirth Connection has produced two phenomenal new resources. There is a report by Sarah Buckley on the Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing and a companion booklet for mothers that simplifies the research into a user-friendly booklet on the role of hormones in a healthy birth. Great resources for childbirth educators and doulas.

For more see: Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing | Transforming Maternity Care.

Small Business Saturday: Womanrunes and Winterspirit

Jan10

“…the business is just a vehicle for sending out my stuff into the world. the real thing, the real magic… is in the creating.”

–Leonie Dawson

“The only domain where the divine is visible is that of art, whatever name we choose to call it.”

–Andre Malreaux (quoted in The Art of Ritual)

We received the second printing of our Womanrunes book this week! They arrived a week ahead of schedule and look beautiful! I’m thrilled to move forward with promotion and distribution of the book. It was a true labor of love and it feels really powerful to share this work with others.

You still have time to get our free digital “Womanrunes Starter Kit” by signing up for our newsletter at Brigid’s Grove. (Scroll down a little and the subscribe box is on the right hand side after our etsy box.) We are also hard at work on a new freebie for our February newsletter, so make sure you’ve signed up and you will automatically get our free “How to Draw a Calamoondala” handout when the newsletter is finished.

It has been on my list for some time to create seasonal goddess sculptures. I felt a wild burst of inspiration at the beginning of the month and created a ton of new sculptures! Only two of them are for the seasonal idea and the others are larger versions of my classic designs. I like the size of my original sculptures, because they fit nicely in the hand or on a birth altar, but I get quite a few requests for larger altar centerpiece figures, so I’m working on fulfilling that request.

When I made these, I was feeling really ready to be done with holiday mode. After feeling excited and energetic about our many plans for 2015, I got up on New Year’s Day feeling crabby, depleted, unfocused, and somehow defeated. After trying to “force” more planning and more decluttering, instead I sat down with my clay and all these new prototypes came out! There is the bigger pregnant goddess people keep asking for, a pendant intended to hold a placenta stone (or regular gemstone), a repair to my cesarean birth goddess sculpt, a grinding-my-corn goddess, and a winterspirit/meditation goddess. After creating them, I felt so happy and excited and back to being recharged. The next day, I created larger versions of my mama goddess and seated mountain pose goddess, plus a brand new springtime water goddess sculpt.

The new seasonal sculpts are very tricky to mold correctly. We’ve only cast the “winterspirit” figure so far. And…she’s evolved again. When we finished her with my favorite red pigment, I decided she might not be Winter after all, but she might be a Red Tent goddess sculpture instead. The feeling she is intended to convey is appropriate for both the Red Tent and for Winter though—she is drawing inward and reflecting, but she is also open to receive or to share as well (with a built in offering bowl in her lap). We plan to have these available in February.

Strength be with Mark! When I make something new, I want the mold ready like, NOW, and I can get really pushy and irritating about it.

We are working through our new Shining Year in Life and Biz workbook from Leonie Dawson. I meant to do a year-end business reflections post, but haven’t had time for it yet and the moment may simply be passing, but I want to share that one of the most powerful (and humbling) things we learned from 2014 was that the idea is only 1% of the process, 99% is in the work and commitment that follows the idea. Many people never make it past the idea phase and as we closed out 2014 we took some time to celebrate and acknowledge the rest of the 99% of doing it, instead of just thinking about or talking about it. Here are some pictures from our epic planning day shortly after Christmas. The far away picture of the table shows what happened when we really got going! The candles are our new intention candles for 2015. We had fun making them!

And, speaking of Shining Years, I’ve been meaning to post about keeping your pewter jewelry shiny. Mark hand finishes and polishes each of our pewter pendants by hand. After wearing for a while, especially if they are immersed in water (like being showered in), the pewter tends to become duller and darker. This is easily solved by just rubbing the pendant with a soft cloth or even just the hem of the shirt you are wearing! They brighten right up with just that simple buffing.

In other bizbits…

We’re happy to be a Gold sponsor of the StoneCrest Dance Center competition team.

And, we’re clearancing out our large triskele design. Only $10!

We’ve also got a few more of our teeny tiny, super cheap scrap goddesses, including one spiral goddess! These are fun for your own projects, tiny altars, or affordable doula gifts. They go fast. 🙂

TINY Nursing mama goddess birth art sculpture (birth altar, mother blessing, doula, midwife, childbirth educator)

And, finally in the work-at-home life, check out who kept me company this afternoon while I was taking new pictures for our shop listings…

He started to play a little nursing game and after having laughed for the first time on January 2nd (seems quite early for laughing!), he was actually cracking up today pulling away while I dipped him down and said, “moved your head!” I couldn’t get a picture or a video of it, but trust me, it was completely adorable.