hearth chant.

Here’s the thing:

Women are the hearth.  We are the blood, the flesh, and the fire of our entire species.  We already hold the center.  We are the center.  In our bodies are the echoes of the earth’s bounty and gifts, the nourishment we need to survive, to breathe, to be.  And yet. Women’s bodies are burning up with ambitions and expectations to provide, provide, provide.  We are to provide the food, the nurturing, the delight, the creative voice, the muse, the intuition, the wealth, the wisdom - endlessly.  Women are wise, magical, beautiful, intuitive, otherworldly, responsible, central. 

We are drowning in this. 

(Just as our earth is drowning in our vast expectations of extraction.) 

I’m so tired of seeing women normalize their traumatic experiences being child bearer, rearer, bread winner, and emotional barometer, all at once.  It is normalized because it is highly productive, which is the center of modernity: production.  We don’t even see that what’s expected of us – what we expect of ourselves – is exactly what we expect of the earth: too much.  Like cows lined up to give all their milk away, we are afforded none for ourselves.  I’m enraged with what modernity – masked as progressive, liberal ideas – is doing to women’s bodies and their experiences in them.  And this is not just what the constructs and ‘others’ are doing to us, it’s what we are doing to ourselves. Women come to me for help, thinking the plants can help them continue extracting.  And perhaps they can, for a time, because plants are nothing but generous.  Like all the female saints and archetypes, they give endlessly, withholding nothing.  But there is no amount of tea or tincture that can be thrown at the machine of modernity to make it stop; we are driving it.  We have to turn the key, get out, and remember that our bodies are as soft as the soil, and cannot be raked against endlessly without depletion.  We women - mothers aunties sisters grandmothers - are the hearth.  The fire will burn us up if we don’t tend it, and insist others take a turn in tending. 

An old, used up hearth has no sense of pride - just as an over-used woman has a deep lack of essence, or self-esteem. Blood has long been linked to self-esteem, and women have been all but bled dry in this age of extraction. Activists and thinkers can talk circles round the extractive way of living off - not on - the land, but few connect the dots between the body of the earth and the bodies that we are. Tending these bodies of ours differently would directly impact our tending of the Earth. Mind you, I’m not implying pampering and delicacy, if women were delicate we would no longer exist.

The imbalances run deep. It’s happening in our bodies right now, just as it’s playing out in the soil and sky. Inflammation, auto-immune disease, cancer.  These are all about too much heat - a fire burning too hot always scorches.  A hearth must be tended by many hands.  Men, women, two-spirits, non-binaries, children, elders, ancestors…we must all tend the center.  Currently, we nearly all adhere to this story that modernity asks of the woman’s basketed body: “carry it all, and make it look easy”.  There is an end to this path, it looks like infertility, chronic illness, chronic depression, cancer, unexplained immune flare, bitterness, and burning to collapse. This path may acknowledge our “hard work”, our “great effort”, and our “incredible contributions”, but it does not see the threadbare woman being crushed with unnecessary ailments under those external accomplishments. To praise only those of us who relinquish our health at any cost is to turn away from any hope of collective health. Noticing how often it happens, from novels to historical figures, is dismaying.

There is another path where it is honorable to do just enough, to let ambition lie fallow at times.  To acknowledge, then share the workload, to never ever leave each other alone to raise our kids in isolation.  And this is not a ‘women’s issue’.  As I keep chanting: we are the hearth.  We are the hearth.  Without our fire – our health – there is no continuation.  No place to stir your ideas around, no place to shelter, no place to be fed from. 

This is crucial to know. 

— * —

Once, in a far off place, there was a central hearth where all our individual embers came from. The story goes that each year, women were given space to replenish the hearth that they tended (and indeed were). They travelled together, from all directions, back to the center. They rekindled their light as part of the sacred duty to the whole. The children were cared for. The home hearth was kept well. They took as long as they needed.

I begin walking barefoot.  The ground is wet, cold, but the direction is clear.  Walk south, towards the hearth, towards the mother.  As I walk, I begin to sink deeper into the duff, and the earth begins to receive my weight with fervor.  She is excited to receive.  Like walking down a shallow set of stairs, I descend, first up to my knees, where ambition leaps.  Releasing into the cool, damp solidity of soil, I continue my descent, up to my belly, where wisdom and possibility seed.  These things give way, as I realize my own exhaustion, deep depletion, need for support.  The ground swallows my breasts, milk releasing slightly as they are stimulated by soil.  Now my neck, my agency - now my mouth, my power.  My eyes are last, but instead of darkness, I see through the black earth a small flame ahead.  No need to walk now, the earth guides me south, takes my weight with ease and allows me full yield.  I arrive at the flame, and it grows to meet me in size.  We stand facing one another, myself and the ember mother, and with gentleness, She consumes me.  My known narratives melt away and I am simply light and warmth, just for a moment.  My senses only know ecstasy, a pure and simple joy, and like an infant’s smile it washes me anew.  Suddenly, I am on my own feet again, and the ground becomes solid, warm stone on bare feet.  I’ve passed through the ember, and continue on, through the clear path of the cave, into the light.  Slowly, I step toward the entrance, or exit, of the cave, and am welcomed back into the falling rain, the wide smooth river, and my sisters, brothers, lovers, children.  In my pocket, close to my belly, is an ember burning soft and warm.

Where the cave meets the moving water, we shake the husk of modernity off and expose our golden, bright selves for all to see. We are exquisite in our imperfections and shortcomings, and bountiful together…like corn, jeweled and resting in the sun.