Birth: A Creative Prompt

A new meditation from Fran Gardner meant to inspire creativity... "Look now! Something is growing."

Birth

Birth, rebirth, creation
Sere is a terrain of want and death.
But then rain comes.
Points of water pockmark the withered land. 
Colors deepen, run together, braiding and pooling. 

The landscape expands: Richer, wider.
The season passes from barren to fecund. 
Meadows flower, deer follow—
The world is ready for new life.

The sounds of birth—
Laugh at the joy of it,
Scream for it to end.
Pain and wonder.
Finally, sigh with the release, 
Body from body, pain from pain.

Birth is always fraught:
The fear, the pain, the fever.
Over and again,
For a rapturous outcome.

Other creation may seem less painful,
For not all birthing is physical.
When the pieces won’t fit, the idea doesn’t coalesce.
You suffer birth pangs for nothing, the outcome unclear.

This is the time to gently water that unbirthed idea.
Look now! Something is growing. 
A wayward, tenacious bloom, a dandelion, a thistle, pushes up from the earth.
This can be your talisman.

Now love and light rush in. 
The idea, replenished, greets the world
With newborn squalls and kicking feet.
You called it forth; it came to you.

You will be pregnant again, with a new idea.
Nurture it inside you.
You are gravid with the weight of it,
Waiting, waiting for release.

You will never forget that creation is pain.
You taste the placental blood.
Mother’s milk is on your baby’s tongue.
Bitter herbs, dried in the desert, all behind you now.

Now you know grief and hope, sorrow and comfort: 
These tensions make you alive, keep you alive.
Your grief will never leave you.
The wound scabs over; the scar stains forever.

You will begin again.
This is something you must do.
There will be a new birth.
Light the candle now.

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…and the next word will be gravid.

Click here to read Sere, the previous creative prompt.

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Read more from Fran at Becoming….

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