Inside- A demo about returning home

photo by jaime eliza

We hiked out to a hidden cove on the Sonoma coast on a sunny Sunday afternoon a few weekends ago, my sweetheart and I traipsing down the cliffside as the pelicans hovered in a V-formation overhead. The purple lupine and white yarrow clung to the rust flavored earth as we found our footing, landing on a small stretch of beach covered in pungent seaweed piles.

The sand was big and pebble-like, heavy when I buried my bare feet beneath it. The sky was bright blue. No wind.

We came to do a meditation, a ritual. It involved shovels.

This is where the inspiration for this demo was born — dug into the heavy sand, feeling the warm sun on my skin, my eyes closed listening to the rhythm of the waves — it reminded me of when my daughters were each newborn babies and I would play whirling whooshing womb sounds to help them fall asleep.

As I cocooned back into that memory, the words of author and healer Martín Prechtel returned to me — in his book The Smell of Rain on Dust he writes “our first song is grief.”

Martín writes about this first grief we all experience as humans as the moment we are born, the moment we leave the paradigm of the womb and make our first exit into the unknown.

 “We must remember that the first nine months of our entire life we lived entirely as underwater creatures day and night, we drift along with the motions of our mother’s air dependent body in the womb held luxury of the amniotic water sack...

We never have to even take a breath for ourselves... we don’t even have to pump our own blood or liquids for our mother’s hydraulics and heart system pump all the material necessary to build us.

…When our own little heart kicks in, we begin to live our womb life to two separate but dynamically intertwined interdependent cadences, our mother’s steady pulse and our own determined light speed trill.

Each of these pulses simultaneously runs through us, ionizing our nerves and souls, and echoing together in the ocean of the amnios like two whales in love, whose dance is motion and hope. It’s much wilder than the sum of the arrhythmic parts. This ongoing counter rhythm is our first song. We hear it in our new ears, in the water, through our body, in our bones.”

It made me wonder about returning to the womb space, what would that be like now? What would it feel like to be completely safe, cared and provided for? What if my life operated with a this type of absolute faith in a liquid love all around me?

Often I find myself chasing and longing for what is not here: for the love, the attention, the care, the safety, the thing on the outside of myself that promises to soothe me somehow. If only I can get the ideal relationship, the goal achieved, make x amount of money, get a person to admit they were wrong, make the world behave fair and right and good — then I would feel safe and happy and loved.

Remembering the womb reunites me with a mythic time, deep time, with something that transcends that longing and locates me back into the truth of my own wholeness and belongingness in the greater schematics of all that is.

I originate from this impossible, miraculous love — we all do.

Even people who are my “enemies”, who oppose everything I believe in and stand for — they too originated in liquid love. They, too, swam in the mythic rhythm of a cosmic maternal drum where all was provided to them for — what feels to us like only 9 months but to a creature who only has that as reference is —eternity.

Then: we are born.

Born into a cold, gravity heavy, loud, rhythm-less world in which our first brave act is to on-faith transform from a liquid breathing creature into an air-breathing being, just like that. Imagine! How terrifying! No more blood pumped for us, food delivered to us, warmth surrounding us. Here we are, in this new world — entirely vulnerable.

Yet, Martín writes, we have no acknowledgment as a culture that we share this grief — that somewhere in each of us, we long to be reunited with a love that envelopes us completely, profoundly, unquestioningly. All of us.

The morning after our beach ritual, I listened to Martín’s audio book chapter from The Smell of Rain on Dust. I gave myself time to gestate, and then I did a songwriting session. The initial sketch is sweet — it feels warm — and I can imagine doing something trippy with the drums to recreate the syncopation of two different heartbeats, and something atmospheric to recreate the whooshing of the womb like waves.

INSIDE
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