Aggie's Smile

In the Reserve, the memory unit where I work part-time, people with advanced stages of dementia are placed. It’s the end of the road for them. People die, about two per month on average. It’s usually a slow process, due to Alzheimers. The brain takes its time in clogging up with the particular detritus of this disease. The malfunctioning of different parts of the brain often follows a pattern of unwinding backwards, through the stages of development. First the cognitive thinking & memories of the forebrain goes. Then it moves slowly deeper and deeper. Impulses lose control. Words disconnect from meaning and finally are often lost altogether. At the end they often do not wish to eat or drink. Finally the swallowing reflex or breathing reflex goes, bringing the end. Others die of concurrent diseases or the influenza.

One of my favorite women, Aggie, was quite feisty, though almost deaf, when she first came to us a couple of months ago. She was stocky, with beautiful, soft, white hair down to her shoulders. It reminds me of angel hair. She loved playing kick ball—yelling –“KICK IT!” when another demented elder lagged in her duty to the game. She puzzled over puzzles, relished eating snacks, and dabbled with watercolors. When I rouse her from her inner world and she sees my face, she breaks into a smile that encompasses her whole face.

But about a week ago she began to decline. Now she declines activities and declines food. Or, if she eats food, she pockets it in her cheeks and later spits it into tissues, if she has them at hand. Otherwise it’s headed for the floor. I see her skin hanging looser on her bones. Each day, I wonder if I will get to see her smile again, whether lost because she dies or because her brain loses even that small blessing of social interaction by the time I am there to see her again.

How Pregnancy Grows from the Menstrual Cycle

The menstrual cycle contains the experiences of Maiden, Mother, & Crone within itself. These primordial archetypes of Goddess enliven and inform us of different phases of women’s creative power. Each cycle we are Maiden, made new with the development of possible egg-babies, and with pheromones and fertile mucus for attracting a mate to fertilize them. We are Mother after ovulation, in the phase that prepares and maintains the nurturing womb. And we are Crone when our hormones plummet if pregnancy doesn’t occur, with the emptying of juice and form while filling with subtle, intuitive heart potential.

By bringing awareness & care into the menstrual cycle, we also gain in experience that will serve us if we ever become pregnant. Healthy nutrition, maintaining energetic balance, nurturing herbs, adequate exercise & rest, relaxation practice -- all serve in both situations.

Pregnancy, then, is the fulfilled form of that Mother/luteal phase, when sperm has successfully merged with ripe egg and developing zygote has implanted firmly into receptive uterine lining. It is the long time of nurturing the dream. Even if pregnancy was not planned or desired, it is still the animal dream of the body to reproduce.

This extra juicy, growing pregnancy phase fills the body with more blood, more heart, more weight, and bigger feet. An actual inner ocean of amniotic fluid forms within the amniotic sac and our evolving babies swim in it until they are born and land on solid ground. The intimate physical connection between mother and baby is mediated by the amazing multiple functions of the placenta.

The last month of pregnancy is often a time associated with discomforts of being full to overflowing—just as premenstrually many women experience the heaviness of their engorged womb, dropping downward a bit from the change of their hormones.

The emotional changes of the fertility cycle can prepare us for dealing with pregnancy feelings. Women who listen to themselves with awareness and care for themselves adequately find that heightened emotional sensitivity is not necessarily a call to bitchiness (although that too can be useful). It can be an opportunity to hear themselves more clearly in respect to what in their lives serves them & what does not. More alone time is a common need that women easily overlook at other times of their lives which may become more pressing during pre-bleeding & pre-birthing.

Giving birth is an enhanced form of the menstrual phase, when what has been grown inside is now ready to be released, even pushed, out into the world. Women who have experienced the inward, downward pulling of energy during moon bleeding will be familiar with that feeling in its greatly intensified form during labor. Healthy menstrual practices help preserve the balance of this key energy for pregnancy & birth. Those who have experienced menstrual cramps and found ways to come to terms with them will recognize the early labor sensation of the cervix beginning to open as a familiar one, not so scary. This brings the relaxed familiarity to early labor often considered possible only for those who have already given birth.

Allowed a deep inwardness, our instincts can guide our posture & movements and provide safe passageway for our creation, just as women guided inwardly during menses can find the right physical and emotional attitude to menstruate with more ease and grace. As the baby and placenta are released, a great emptiness is created in our body, even as our heart expands with instinctual, hormonal love. We flow with so large a postpartum “menses” as part of that huge emptying and flow with milk as part of that heart expansion.

Learning from and cultivating awareness during our cycles thus prepares us for pregnancy and birth. It increases our creative potential as Maiden, Mother, and Crone, whether we ever give birth physically or not.

The Brown Bat

The brown bat with wings the size of my hands, buzzes over our heads, derailing conversation. Nine variously shaped and colored naked people lounge in the deep & wide hot spring pool in the foothills of the San Luis Valley. It’s daytime. I warn the sweet blond woman who wanted to get closer to it that bats flying in the daytime may be disoriented and sick. I’d found a similar bat one day in my backyard a few years ago. Animal Control said not to approach it. That bat died within a few hours.

I feel as though the bat is flying at me. Then he splashes into the pool, within arm’s reach. I scoot my bare body through the still waters, away from him, while he swims with his wings towards the shore. He pulls himself up the rocks and into the bushes. “Is he gone? Can you see where he is?” we all chatter at once.

In a flash I remember stories about bats: bats that get tangled in your hair, so you have to shave it off; bats swooping in near our faces as we run out to the tent in my cousin’s backyard at dusk, balancing a big bowl of popcorn in my hands; bats sneaking into our apartment when I was a child & Dad swinging a broom at them each time to chase them out; bats that have rabies and bite you and then the painful series of shots needed to avoid horrible suffering and mental derangement.

Suddenly the bat launches into the air again, skimming our heads. A few of us startle and scream.

Later at the registration center I mention seeing the bat in the daytime. The host says, ”When in doubt, be cautious. But it sounds like a local bat and in the spring they often feed in the daytime due to the cold of night. And bats dipping into the hot springs pool are not unusual around here.”

Butter

Everything is better with butter. You can engrave that on my memorial stone. My family knows that I can only relax if I know that there’s at least a pound of butter in the house. Are there really people who eat cooked vegetables without a dollop of that golden ambrosia gently melting down its slopes & crags, enriching the taste of each spoonful?

Maybe my love of butter is hereditary. My Grandma Moan used to eat it straight from the butter dish. Butter seemed to her like spinach to Popeye the Sailor Man. She was a strong, sparrow of a woman, who lived about ninety years, chopping wood for her stove almost to the end. She’d serve butter up to us on her sturdy, home-baked bread, especially tantalizing straight from the oven, when the butter melts deep into the grain of the slice.

In the dairy states of Minnesota and Wisconsin, eating butter was a form of solidarity with the small farmers of those days. They resisted the push for margarine by passing laws that only allowed margarine to be sold in its unimproved form. Aunt & Uncle Nestor used the stuff. I remember that it came in a sealed plastic bag, all white, like lard, with a red dot of dye in the middle. We’d have simple fun squeezing the bag of lard—I mean butter—over and over until the dye was distributed evenly giving the margarine a butter-like color. But I never forgot what it really looked like. And our family never used margarine no matter what claims were made for it.

In India the cow is sacred and so, milk and butter are holy gifts. Lord Krishna Himself was raised as a cow herder and many a portrait shows Him playing His flute as he tends the cows. Well treated cows give more milk and better milk.

For butter to be at its best, it must come from such cows—treated with love and respect. They should neither be treated like cattle in the pejorative sense or milked for profits using inhumane methods. Such cows are difficult to find in America. Organic farms MIGHT be better. The best is most likely found locally, made from milk received from a small family farm. I remember going to the local creamery with Grandfather, where the nearby farmers brought their milk to a collective to be pasteurized and made into butter and cheese. Now who knows where our milk and butter come from? And if those cows were serenaded ?

Poem- My Paper Friend

Oh, Paper Friend--
I need your kind patience of pages,
Your passive blankness,
Out of which I can coax my own expression
& see it in the face.
You are true.
You do not gloss or hide or change what I dare reveal.
You just accept
And keep me true to my own words,
For they are still waiting in your perfect memory.

- by Terra Rafael