The Wild Mother

It’s the beginning of June, 2025. Two weeks to the summer solstice.

I am sitting, alone, in a coffee shop, slowly sipping matcha, with ninety minutes in front of me. My brain spins – do I want to read a book, close my eyes and listen to Leon Bridges on the radio, answer my unread emails and text messages, find a climbing gym for my insanely-climbing-ly skilled toddler who can’t even walk?

I have longed for this level of spaciousness for a long time. And in the preceding months where I have dreamed of and longed for these moments, there are two things that consistently come forward – I need space to write, and I need space to go sit by a river. And since we went to the river yesterday as a family, I am writing.

I have no idea what I will write because there are at least a dozen essays floating around in my womb, and I don’t always know what is most important. The oracular channel? The mom jokes? The mundane? The magic?

Deep breath. Leon Bridges croons, “She might just be my everything…”

Here I am.

I made it through the last couple of years.

In fact, I realize now, sitting here, that Oran was conceived almost exactly two years ago. Maybe one year and 49 weeks ago… Which seems absolutely impossible, and wholly real. The shortest and longest two years of my life, which have stretched and burned and sweetened and burned and re-shaped me, body, mind and soul.

Hozier is on the radio now—one of my mid-maiden’s absolute favorites… “Move me, baby, shake like the bough of a willow tree, you do it naturally, Move me, baby.”

That girl- that young woman—so full of herself (and I don’t say that condescendingly… she was FULL of herSELF)--- is long gone.

In many ways, it has been a rapid death. And in many ways, I am still dying and being born. In many ways, it has taken me the full 14-months of Oran’s life, and a plant dieta with Ohia Lehua, and a move back to my hometown, and a health crisis, to fully die into my Mother embodiment.

Those first months—the first year, even—so full of adrenaline and cortisol and incessant change—that the body didn’t even have time to die. You know what I mean? We had to keep a baby alive! And learn who we were as parents, and keep our relationship somewhat functioning, and make money (WHAT?!) and keep in any way close to our paths of dharma and awakening.

But my body is starting to let go now. I am starting to trust others to care for my son, and let go of my fixation on aspects of my relationship, and actually chose peace and creation, and joy, and presence, even when every ancestral and collective pattern prefers otherwise.

And I am starting to truly weave the magical and the mundane.

So, I suppose, like always, this essay is about both. It’s about the ways that my son’s incessant need to climb our furniture and pull altars off shelves and put his hands INTO his poopy diaper is part of his magic.

_______

Please don’t let me fool you that because I am a writer, and a mystic who is deeply devoted to the path of awakening, and a keeper of the plants and of song, that I am or was in ANY way immune to the human experience, and that includes parenting. I am 100% sure that many of you are better parents than me, and likely that I am better than some. But now, when I see a parent’s eyes, I KNOW.

It is the fire. And the burnout. And the eyes that dart from place to place looking for a way out. Side note: more than one person sent me a meme recently that said, “Has anyone discovered a way out other than through?”

I get that.

Let me also truly name that loving my son has been without a doubt the easiest thing I have ever done. The way my heart and body and mind and voice open to receive his perfectly imperfect humanness, and the way I will give him my last bites of food, and the absolute saintly patience with which I contact nap with him (because we both love it) and the way he smells, and the joy his smile and his laugh brings, is truly, truly, truly, the best thing on Earth.

I may fantasize about running away to a nunnery (or a gentlemen’s club, depending on the moment in my cycle), but the truth is, putting him to sleep at night is exactly where I want to be.

I think this is the paradox of humaning.

We want freedom, and containment.

We want to be single, and we long for family.

We want intimacy, and we want space.

We are insanely annoyed, and deeply in love.

We are irrevocably committed, and want to run away.

This is what it means to be human.

And learning to hold this paradox, to hold the hips and heart wide, to let the body feel and sense and taste and speak and dance and weep and rage—this is the initiation of the Mother. She can hold it all.

And not perfectly. Not like Mother Mary white robes.

No, she’s like a wild dog with roses pouring from her heart, and eggs with avocado in her hands (imperfectly sea-salted), with a mouth that both sings and growls, and a rainbow crown of light, and a womb filled with blood, and muddy feet—sometimes be grieving and sometimes praising the beloved. And she is ALL of it. And she knows it’s all true.

I am tired of performance. I am tired of trying to be anything for you or for me that is. anything other than what I am in this moment. And you know what? That’s especially strange and awkward when you’re a line 5 in human design and people pay you to hold space for them. And somehow, they think you are somehow more perfect than them.

So, it’s strange—because the longer I walk the path, the more human I become. The more my wounds become visible, and the more I feel the tension between whatever projected identity others have co-created with my ego, and the REALITY of who I am.

Becoming a mother has brought that into plain view – because you can’t really hide the mess of becoming a mother. Everything eeks out sideways. Your hair, your nails, your meditation practice—everything rightfully falls apart.

And then, some part of you becomes comfortable with the messiness of it, and the holes in your clothes and the b.o. from weaning, and you develop a glint in your eye. Because the Great Mother is with you—in her dakini fae form. She’s taking you on a wild ride – a toady, magic carpet ride—and you’re dirty.

I spent a long time in the last 18 months trying to make that not be the case. I really, really wanted to not get on the carpet ride. I wanted to stay in the heavens and the fantasy of partnership and family, and build the perfect piece of land, but the Great Mother knew what I needed.

The dakini, and the fairies, and the dragons came in and brought me a wild child and a house. in the suburbs and a partner whose stubborn power fixation mirrored mine, and my body and brain started to break the f down.

And here, I am.

In a coffee shop writing you this essay. I like where it’s going. Let’s keep writing. I can feel the medicine flowing in.
________

I had a therapist (one of the best, who helped me integrated deep years of plant dieta and trauma resolution), once who said to me, “Jane, when we start the session, I don’t have an agenda. I don’t have a place I want us to go. I’m just listening to your body and your voice, and I am following what is alive.”

That informs all the work I do now.

And it informs the way I want to live and Mother and even to write—because that is actually how the medicine comes.

When we can dive down, down, down, and we can pause—

And we can resist the urge to craft the perfect story or therapy session or even to attach our consciousness to the familiar structures and stories and identities we have known before, something deeper can be born from within us.

I try to explain this to people when we’re practicing opening our creative channels—we get to keep writing, keep singing, keep listening, keep moving, in stillness, without agenda, until something INSPIRED and ORGANIC and TRUE is born. And truly to let go of whatever it is, or if its good, or if it’s what we thought it would be.

When I started writing this essay, I truly had no idea where it would go, or if anything at all would arrive that felt alive, but I just kept writing (just like I am right now!) and I’m as pleased as you (maybe?) that something magical is bring born.

It’s like riding the edge of a wave—where we just keep sensing the pulse of life beneath the feet, and we just keep staying right there, right there, right there, with what’s alive, and let the wave crest and then settle. And we don’t make anything else happen after that. We just witness what was born.

We don’t have an agenda. We let life be born through us. As us.

This is how we become Mothers of Creation.

And it’s like, ALL OF CREATION. None of the parts of this human experience are off limits. Something NEW can be born from within us!

_________

And so, HI! Hi, from some strange edge of the forest underworld where I am learning to integrate the frogs and the bogs and the maddening paradoxical impulses of Mothering (the ones that say RUN! And STAY!) at the same time. And where I am experimenting with relaxing with my impulse to fixate, and where I am wondering who my husband might become if I showered him with rose petals. And who I might become if I let myself be red dakini and a whore and a toadstool as much as an angel and a dragon and a swan.

I am meeting life as it arises, with the ever-developing skill of a Mother who is deeply devoted to becoming the TRUEST embodiment of love and truth that she can for a son who deserves to have a mother who is connected to her wildness and her range and her vulnerability and strength and wit and pain.

Our sons deserve that—they deserve to know the Feminine. They deserve to see and feel and taste the range of the Mother.

They deserve to know that, paradoxically, wildness is safe.

That the Mother is able to hold it, and them, all.

A Mother who is full of truth, and love, and color and shape and form—

and that all of Her can be held in the LIGHT of loving awareness.

So, this, Oran, this becoming, is for you. It is the greatest gift I can give.

May you truly know the Mother.

__________

Leon Bridges comes back on the radio here in the coffee shop: “Oh, I wanna come near and give you, every part of me, but there's blood on my hands, and my lips are unclean... Take me to your river, I wanna go, Oh, go, take me to your river, I wanna know…”

And with that, the crest of the wave falls. The transmission is complete, the energy waning, the creation rests. I have made myself a vessel for creation today, and I rest.

It is enough. Hallelujah.